Running Istio on Oracle Kubernetes Engine–the managed Kubernetes Cloud Service by Lucas Jellema

In a recent post, I introduced the managed Oracle Cloud Service for Kubernetes, the Oracle Kubernetes Engine (OKE). A logical next step when working with Kubernetes in somewhat challenging situations, for example with microservice style architectures and deployments, is the use of Istio – to configure, monitor and manage the so called service mesh. Istio – https://istio.io – is brand new – not even Beta yet, although a first production release is foreseen for Q3 2018. It offers very attractive features, including:

intelligent routing of requests, including load balancing, A/B testing, content/condition based routing, blue/green release, canary release
resilicience – for example through circuit breaking and throttling
policy enforcement and access control
telemetry, monitoring, reporting

In this article, I will describe how I got started with Istio on the OKE cluster that I provisioned in the previous article. Note: there is really nothing very special about OKE for Istio: it is just another Kubernetes cluster, and Istio will do its thing. More interesting perhaps is the fact that I work on a Windows laptop and use a Vagrant/VirtualBox powered Ubuntu VM to do some of the OKE interaction, especially when commands and scripts are Linux only.

The steps I will describe:

install Istio client in the Linux VM
deploy Istio to the OKE Kubernetes Cluster
deploy the Bookinfo sample application with Sidecar Injection (the Envoy Sidecar is the proxy that is added to every Pod to handle all traffic into and out of the Pod; this is the magic that makes Istio work)
try out some typical Istio things – like traffic management and monitoring

The conclusion is that leveraging Istio on OKE is quite straightforward.

Install Istio Client in Linux VM

The first step with Istio, prior to deploying Istio to the K8S cluster, is the installation on your client machine of the istoctl client application and associated sources, including the Kubernetes yaml files required for the actual deployment. Note: I tried deployment of Istio using a Helm chart, but that did not work and it seems that Istio 0.7.x is not suitable for Helm (release 0.8 is supposed to be ready for Helm). Read the complete article here.

Developer Partner Community

For regular information become a member in the WebLogic Partner Community please visit: http://www.oracle.com/partners/goto/wls-emea ( OPN account required). If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center.

Blog Twitter LinkedIn Facebook Meetups