Kubernetes istio istioctl

Installing Istio

curl -L https://istio.io/downloadIstio | sh -

Configuration Profiles

istioctl install --set profile=demo
istioctl install --set profile=default

Customizing configs

istioctl profile dump default  # show settings

istioctl install --set addonComponents.kiali.enabled=true \ 
--set components.telemetry.enabled=true \ 
--set components.citadel.enabled=true \ 
--set values.global.proxy.privileged=true \ 
--set addonComponents.tracing.enabled=true \ 
--set values.pilot.traceSampling=100.0 \ 
--set values.global.proxy.tracer=datadog

While changing any config, make sure to pass all the previous flags with the new ones. Failing to add any previously enabled variable will revert the config to its default values. One way to store the dump in a file and do istioctl apply or use helm charts for Istio.

Sidecar injection

To enable sidecar, we have to add labels at the namespace level.

kubectl label namespace dsl-test istio-injection=enabled

For services, which do not require sidecar, we need to add the following annotation in the deployment template:

# Pod Annotations 
podAnnotations: 
	sidecar.istio.io/inject: "false"

$ istioctl proxy-status  # overview of your mesh