Introducing Istio Service Mesh for Microservices

Chapter 2. Installation and Getting Started

Command-Line Tools Installation

In this section, we show you how to get started with Istio on Kubernetes. Istio is not tied to Kubernetes in anyway, and in fact, it’s intended to be agnostic of any deployment infrastructure. Kubernetes is a great place to run Istio with its native support of the sidecar-deployment concept. Feel free to use any distribution of Kubernetes you wish, but here we use minishift, which is a developer flavor of an enterprise distribution of Kubernetes named OpenShift.

As a developer, you might already have some of these tools, but for completeness, here are the tools you will need:

• minishift

• Docker for Mac/Windows

• kubectl

• oc client tools for your OS (note: “minishift oc-env” will output the path to the oc client binary)

• mvn

• stern for easily viewing logs

• siege for load testing

• istioctl (will be installed via the steps that follow momentarily)

• curl, tar part of your bash/cli shell

• Git

Kubernetes/OpenShift Installation

When you bootstrap minishift, you’ll need to keep in mind that you’ll be creating a lot of services. You’ll be installing the Istio control plane, some supporting metrics and visualization applications, and your sample services. To accomplish this, the virtual machine (VM) that you use to run Kubernetes will need to have enough resources. Although we recommend 8 GB of RAM and 3 CPUs for the VM, we have seen the examples contained in this book run successfully on 4 GB of RAM ...