Managing an Application with Istio

In this lab, we’re going to enable monitoring in our Istio mesh, using both Prometheus and Grafana. Once we have the ports forwarded to `localhost` on the master node, we will need to implement an Nginx proxy to allow outside access.

Learning Objectives

Successfully complete this lab by achieving the following learning objectives:

Install Istio in Kubernetes and Deploy the bookinfo Application

Get the Istio installation package and unpack it:

[cloud_user@km]$ wget https://github.com/istio/istio/releases/download/1.0.6/istio-1.0.6-linux.tar.gz
[cloud_user@km]$ tar -xvf istio-1.0.6-linux.tar.gz

Add istioctl to our path:

[cloud_user@km]$ export PATH=$PWD/istio-1.0.6/bin:$PATH

Set Istio to NodePort type, and set the nodePort to port 30080:

[cloud_user@km]$ sed -i 's/LoadBalancer/NodePort/;s/31380/30080/' ./istio-1.0.6/install/kubernetes/istio-demo.yaml

Bring up the Istio control plane:

[cloud_user@km]$ kubectl apply -f ./istio-1.0.6/install/kubernetes/istio-demo.yaml

Verify that the control plane is running, but note that it may take a minute or two:

[cloud_user@km]$ kubectl -n istio-system get pods

Install the bookinfo application with manual sidecar injection:

kubectl apply -f <(istioctl kube-inject -f istio-1.0.6/samples/bookinfo/platform/kube/bookinfo.yaml)

Verify that the application is running and that there are 2 containers per pod. This may take another minute or so:

[cloud_user@km]$ kubectl get pods

Create an ingress and virtual service for the application:

[cloud_user@km]$ kubectl apply -f istio-1.0.6/samples/bookinfo/networking/bookinfo-gateway.yaml

Now, in a web browser, let’s verify the page loads at the URL http://<kn1_PUBLIC_IP ADDRESS>:30080/productpage.

Configure the Forwarder, Install Nginx, and Access the Grafana Dashboard

Configure Grafana to forward to localhost:

[cloud_user@km]$ kubectl -n istio-system port-forward $(kubectl -n istio-system get pod -l app=grafana -o jsonpath='{.items[0].metadata.name}') 3000:3000 &

Install and configure Nginx to proxy to the Grafana port:

[cloud_user@km]$ sudo apt install -y nginx

Change the Nginx config by editing /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default with whichever text editor you like (but remember privileges, and run something like sudo vi...). Comment out all existing lines in the location / directive, and add proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:3000. The results should look like this:

location / {
    # First attempt to serve request as file, then
    # as directory, then fall back to displaying a 404.
    #try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
    proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:3000;
}

Then restart Nginx:

[cloud_user@km]$ sudo systemctl restart nginx

Load Grafana at http://<km_PUBLIC_IP ADDRESS/dashboard/db/istio-mesh-dashboard and review the installed Istio dashboards.

If the mesh traffic dashboard does not populate when the application is refreshed, then rerun this command to re-apply the mixer configuration:

[cloud_user@km]$ kubectl apply -f ./istio-1.0.6/install/kubernetes/istio-demo.yaml

What are Hands-on Labs

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Managing an Application with Istio

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