Girish Ranganathan

Lee Calcote

Head of Technology Strategy, SolarWinds

Principal Architect, SolarWinds

Using Istio

Lee Calcote

linkedin.com/in/leecalcote

@lcalcote

gingergeek.com

lee@calcotestudios.com

clouds, containers, functions, applications, and their management

calcotestudios.com/talks

github.com/leecalcote

R

Show of Hands

Microservices

The more, the more merrier?

Benefits

The first few services are relatively easy

Democratization of language and technology choice

Faster delivery, service teams running independently, rolling updates

@lcalcote

Challenges

The next 10 or so may introduce pain

Language and framework-specific libraries

Distributed environments, ephemeral infrastructure, out-moded tooling

Which is why...

I have a container orchestrator.

@lcalcote

Core

Capabilities

Cluster Management
- Host Discovery
- Host Health Monitoring
Scheduling
Orchestrator Updates and Host Maintenance
Service Discovery
Networking and Load Balancing
Stateful Services
Multi-Tenant, Multi-Region

Additional

Key Capabilities

Application Health and Performance Monitoring
Application Deployments
Application Secrets

@lcalcote

What do we need?

• Observability

• Logging
• Metrics
• Tracing

• Traffic Control

• Resiliency

• Efficiency
• Security

• Policy

@lcalcote

a Service Mesh

What is a Service Mesh?

a dedicated layer for managing service-to-service communication

@lcalcote

so, a microservices platform?

obviously.

Orchestrators don't bring all that you need

and neither do service meshes,

but they do get you closer.

Missing: application lifecycle management, but not by much

partially.

a services-first network

Missing: distributed debugging; provide nascent visibility (topology)

@lcalcote

DEV

OPS

Layer 5

where Dev and Ops meet

Problem: too much infrastructure code in services

Why use a Service Mesh?

to avoid...

Bloated service code
Duplicating work to make services production-ready
- load balancing, auto scaling, rate limiting, traffic routing...
Inconsistency across services
- retry, tls, failover, deadlines, cancellation, etc., for each language, framework
- siloed implementations lead to fragmented, non-uniform policy application and difficult debugging
Diffusing responsibility of service management

@lcalcote

Help with Modernization

@lcalcote

Can modernize your IT inventory without:
- Rewriting your applications
- Adopting microservices, regular services are fine
- Adopting new frameworks
- Moving to the cloud

Address the long-tail of IT services

Get there for free

What is Istio?

An open platform to connect, manage, and secure microservices

@lcalcote

Observability
Resiliency
Traffic Control
Security
Policy Enforcement

istio.io

github.com/istio

@IstioMesh

Observability

is what gets people hooked on service metrics

@lcalcote

Goals

Metrics without instrumenting apps
Consistent metrics across fleet
Trace flow of requests across services
Portable across metric back-end providers

You get a metric! You get a metric! Everyone gets a metric!

Traffic Control

control over chaos

@lcalcote

Traffic splitting
- L7 tag based routing?
Traffic steering
- Look at the contents of a request and route it to a specific set of instances.
Ingress and egress routing

Resilency

Systematic fault injection
Timeouts and Retries with timeout budget
Circuit breakers and Health checks
Control connection pool size and request load

content-based traffic steering

Istio Architecture

@lcalcote

Control Plane

Data Plane

Touches every packet/request in the system. Responsible for service discovery, health checking, routing, load balancing, authentication, authorization, and observability.

Provides policy and configuration for services in the mesh.

Takes a set of isolated stateless sidecar proxies and turns them into a service mesh.

Does not touch any packets/requests in the system.

Pilot

Citadel

Mixer

Control Plane

Data Plane

istio-system namespace

policy check

Foo Pod

Proxy Sidecar

Service Foo

tls certs

discovery & config

Foo Container

Bar Pod

Proxy Sidecar

Service Bar

Bar Container

Out-of-band telemetry propagation

telemetry

reports

Control flow during request processing

application traffic

Application traffic

application namespace

telemetry reports

Istio Architecture

@lcalcote

What's Pilot for?

@lcalcote

provides service discovery to sidecars

manages sidecar configuration

Pilot

Auth

Control Plane

the head of the ship

Mixer

istio-system namespace

system of record for service mesh

}

provides abstraction from underlying platforms

What's Mixer for?

Point of integration with infrastructure back ends
- Intermediates between Istio and backends, under operator control
- Enables platform and environment mobility
Responsible for policy evaluation and telemetry reporting
- Provides granular control over operational policies and telemetry
Has a rich configuration model
- Intent-based config abstracts most infrastructure concerns

@lcalcote

Pilot

Auth

Mixer

Control Plane

istio-system namespace

an attribute-processing and routing machine

operator-focused

Precondition checking
Quota management
Telemetry reporting

Mixer

@lcalcote

Mixer

Control Plane

Data Plane

istio-system namespace

Foo Pod

Proxy Sidecar

Service Foo

Foo Container

Out-of-band telemetry propagation

Control flow during request processing

application traffic

Application traffic

application namespace

telemetry reports

an attribute processing engine

R

What's Auth for?

@lcalcote

Verifiable identity
- Issues certs
- Certs distributed to service proxies
- Mounted as a Kubernetes secret
Secure naming / addressing
Traffic encryption

Pilot

Auth

Control Plane

security at scale

Mixer

istio-system namespace

security by default

Orchestrate Key & Certificate:

Generation
Deployment
Rotation
Revocation

Service Proxy Sidecar

A C++ based L4/L7 proxy

Low memory footprint

In production at Lyft

@lcalcote

Capabilities:

API driven config updates → no reloads
Zone-aware load balancing w/ failover
Traffic routing and splitting
Health checks, circuit breakers, timeouts, retry budgets, fault injection…
HTTP/2 & gRPC
Transparent proxying
Designed for observability

the included battery

Data Plane

Pod

Proxy sidecar

App Container

Extensibility of Istio

@lcalcote

Envoy, Linkerd, Nginx, Conduit

@lcalcote

Swapping Proxies

Why use another service proxy?

Based on your operational expertise and need for battle-tested proxy. You may be looking for caching, WAF, or other functionality available in NGINX Plus.

If you're already running Linkerd and want to start adopting Istio control APIs like CheckRequest.

@lcalcote

Conduit not currently designed as a general-purpose proxy, but lightweight and focused with extensibility via gRPC plugin.

nginMesh

https://github.com/nginmesh

Currently

Support for rules, policies, mtls encryption, monitoring tracing
Compatible with Mixer adaptors
Transparent sidecar injection
Compatible with Istio 0.3.0

@lcalcote

Roadmap

Support for gRPC traffic
Support for ingress proxy
Support for Quota Checks
Expanding the mesh beyond Kubernetes

See sidecar-related limitations as well as supported traffic management rules --> here.

Considered beta quality

Soliciting feedback and participation from community

Istio and nginMesh

Architecture

@lcalcote

agent

Pilot

Auth

Mixer

Control Plane

Translator agent Istio to Nginx (in go)
Loadable module Nginx to Mixer (in rust)

config file

Data Plane

Mixer Module

"istio-proxy" container

route rules

tcp server

istio-system namespace

check

report

listener

dest

module

tcp

http

Out-of-band telemetry propagation

Control flow during request processing

application traffic

http servers

Recording - O'Reilly: Istio and nginMesh

AppOptics™

@lcalcote

Uses pluggable adapters to extend its functionality
- Adapters run within the Mixer process
Adapters are modules that interface to infrastructure backends
- (logging, metrics, quotas, etc.)
Multi-interface adapters are possible
- (e.g. SolarWinds® adapter sends logs and metrics)

Mixer Adapters

types: logs, metrics, access control, quota

Papertrail™

Prometheus

Stackdriver

Open Policy Agent

Grafana

Fluentd

Statsd

®

Demo

Let's look at Istio's canonical sample app.

@lcalcote

BookInfo Sample App

Reviews v1

Reviews Pod

@lcalcote

Reviews v2

Reviews v3

Product Pod

Details Container

Details Pod

Ratings Container

Ratings Pod

Product Container

Reviews Service

BookInfo Sample App

Reviews v1

Reviews Pod

@lcalcote

Reviews v2

Reviews v3

Product Pod

Details Container

Details Pod

Ratings Container

Ratings Pod

Product Container

Nginx sidecar

Reviews Service

Nginx sidecar

Envoy ingress

@lcalcote

kubectl version
kubectl get ns
kubectl apply -f ../istio-appoptics-0.5.1-solarwinds-v01.yaml
kubectl apply -f ./install/kubernetes/istio-sidecar-injector.yaml

check environment; deploy Istio

kubectl get ns
watch kubectl get po,svc -n istio-system
kubectl apply -f <(istioctl kube-inject -f samples/bookinfo/kube/bookinfo.yaml)

confirm deployment Istio; deploy sample app

watch kubectl get po,svc
kubectl describe po/ | more
echo "http://$(kubectl get nodes -o template --template='{{range.items}}{{range.status.addresses}}{{if eq .type "InternalIP"}}{{.address}}{{end}}{{end}}{{end}}'):$(kubectl get svc istio-ingress -n istio-system -o jsonpath='{.spec.ports[0].nodePort}')/productpage"

confirm sample app

Demo

running Istio

Demo

running Istio

@lcalcote

echo "http://$(kubectl get nodes -o template --template='{{range.items}}{{range.status.addresses}}{{if eq .type "InternalIP"}}{{.address}}{{end}}{{end}}{{end}}'):$(kubectl get svc istio-ingress -n istio-system -o jsonpath='{.spec.ports[0].nodePort}')/productpage"

See "reviews" v1, v2 and v3

# From Docker's perspective
docker ps | grep istio-proxy

# From Kubernetes' perspective
kubectl get po  
kubectl describe <a pod>

Verify mesh deployment

# exec into 'istio-proxy'
kubectl exec -it <a pod> -c istio-proxy /bin/bash

Connect to proxy sidecar

@lcalcote

# Generate load for Mixer telemetry adapter
docker run --rm istio/fortio load -c 1 -t 10m \
`echo "http://$(kubectl get nodes -o template --template='{{range.items}}{{range.status.addresses}}{{if eq .type "InternalIP"}}{{.address}}{{end}}{{end}}{{end}}'):$(kubectl get svc istio-ingress -n istio-system -o jsonpath='{.spec.ports[0].nodePort}')/productpage"`

Verify mesh configuration

Demo

running Istio

#Deploy new configuration to Nginx
istioctl create -f ./samples/bookinfo/kube/route-rule-all-v1.yaml 
istioctl delete -f ./samples/bookinfo/kube/route-rule-all-v1.yaml

#A/B testing for user "lee"
kubectl apply -f ./samples/bookinfo/kube/route-rule-reviews-test-v2.yaml

Apply traffic routing policy

See Mixer telemetry

SolarWinds Adapter for Istio

Try it out - github.com/solarwinds/istio-adapter

@lcalcote

®

Using Istio

Lee Calcote

Show of Hands

Microservices

The more, the more merrier?

Benefits

Challenges

Which is why...

I have a container orchestrator.

Core

Capabilities

Additional

Key Capabilities

What do we need?

a Service Mesh

What is a Service Mesh?

a services-first network

DEV

OPS

Layer 5

Why use a Service Mesh?

Help with Modernization

What is Istio?

Observability

Goals

Traffic Control

Resilency

Istio Architecture

Istio Architecture

Istio Architecture

What's Pilot for?

What's Mixer for?

Mixer

What's Auth for?

Service Proxy Sidecar

Extensibility of Istio

Swapping Proxies

Why use another service proxy?

nginMesh

Istio and nginMesh

Mixer Adapters

Demo

BookInfo Sample App

BookInfo Sample App

Demo

Demo

Demo

SolarWinds Adapter for Istio

Lee Calcote

Thank you. Questions?

Girish Ranganathan