Install Istio and Gateway APIs¶
Istio is a popular Service Mesh, an infrastructure layer that manages communication between microservices in a Kubernetes cluster.
Istio adds many custom features to Kubernetes like traffic routing, mTLS, gateways, sidecar rules, policies, and more
Install Istio crds from istio/base and install istio daemon(istiod) a control plane the manages everything related to Istio
helm repo add istio https://istio-release.storage.googleapis.com/charts
helm repo update
helm install istio-base istio/base -n istio-system --create-namespace
kubectl get crds | grep istio
helm install istiod istio/istiod -n istio-system
Validate istio installation
kubectl -n istio-system get all
Check the gateway class. You should see two gateway classes
kubectl get gc
istio - This is Istio’s built-in controller that manages Gateway resources. It creates and manages actual gateway pods (like istio-ingressgateway) in your cluster.
istio-remote - It references gateways that exist in another. Meaning the controller is in another cluster and especially useful for the multi cluster mesh management.