Istio Playground

Play around with Istio in a local virtual machine using Minikube.

Let's install Minikube and Istio:

sudo ./install-minikube.sh
./install-istio.sh

sudo is necessary to install minikube and kubectl under /usr/bin/. Istio will be installed under the local istio/ directory.

Let's start Minikube:

./start-minikube.sh

Wait a minute or two for the magic to happen. It will then open the Kubernetes Dashboard in your web browser.

From now on note that when you apply new applications it may take a minute or two for containers to install and start, so be patient and keep refreshing your browser. You can always look at what's going on in the Kubernetes Dashboard.

Let's apply Istio and its add-ons to our Kubernetes cluster:

./apply-istio.sh

In the Kubernetes Dashboard change the namespace to "istio-system" to see its workloads. Now let's open the Istio Dashboard (Grafana):

./open-istio-dashboard.sh

Let's open the Istio Service Graph (two pages):

./open-istio-service-graph.sh

Not much to see yet! Let's apply our demo application (Bookinfo) and open its page:

./apply-bookinfo.sh
./open-bookinfo.sh

OK, so now we can start generating some service mesh data. Click on the "normal user" and refresh many times. The Istio Dashboard will start showing data flowing and the Service Graph page will display your mesh graph. Hooray!

When you're done playing, shut down the port forwarding we've been doing in the background:

killall kubectl

To delete Bookinfo:

istio/samples/bookinfo/kube/cleanup.sh

To delete your Minikube virtual machine:

minikube delete

Interesting Things to Do

See how Istio injects its sidecar:

vim istio/samples/bookinfo/kube/bookinfo.yaml
istio/bin/istioctl kube-inject -f istio/samples/bookinfo/kube/bookinfo.yaml | vim - -c 'set syntax=yaml'

Create virtual services:

istio/bin/istioctl create -f istio/samples/bookinfo/routing/route-rule-all-v1.yaml
istio/bin/istioctl get virtualservices -o yaml | vim - -c 'set syntax=yaml'
istio/bin/istioctl get destinationrules -o yaml | vim - -c 'set syntax=yaml'
istio/bin/istioctl delete -f istio/samples/bookinfo/routing/route-rule-all-v1.yaml

Get a shell into a sidecar to see how it routes to Envoy at port 15001: (also see video here)

kubectl exec -it $(utils/get-first-pod-name.sh -l app=productpage) -c istio-proxy /bin/bash
sudo iptables -L -n -t nat

Get a shell into the Istio ingress container:

kubectl exec -it -n istio-system $(utils/get-first-pod-name.sh -n istio-system -l istio=ingress) /bin/bash

Get a throwaway shell into the cluster:

kubectl run -it --rm --restart=Never busybox --image=busybox sh
wget -qO- productpage:9080