Introduction to Istio

Decoupling at Layer 5

Lee Calcote

calcotestudios.com/talks

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

Girish Ranganathan

Open Source Mantainer

You have questions.

 

He has answers.

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.

partially.

a services-first network

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

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!

© 2018 SolarWinds Worldwide, LLC. All rights reserved.

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

  • Control connection pool size and request load

  • Circuit breakers and Health checks

 

content-based traffic steering

Missing: application lifecycle management, but not by much

Missing: distributed debugging; provide nascent visibility (topology)

The Service Mesh Community

Join Slack http://slack.layer5.io

[Optional] Subscribe to newsletter https://layer5.io/subscribe

Prereq

Confirm Prerequisites 

@lcalcote

 

  1. Start Docker Desktop, Minikube or other.
    (either single-node or multi-node clusters will work)

  2. Verify that you have a functional Docker environment by running :

$ docker run hello-world
Unable to find image 'hello-world:latest' locally
latest: Pulling from library/hello-world
1b930d010525: Pull complete
Digest: sha256:0e11c388b664df8a27a901dce21eb89f11d8292f7fca1b3e3c4321bf7897bffe
Status: Downloaded newer image for hello-world:latest

Hello from Docker!

Docker and Kubernetes

Prereq

Prepare Docker Desktop

@lcalcote

Ensure your Docker Desktop VM has 4GB of memory assigned.

Ensure Kubernetes is enabled.

Prereq

Deploy Kubernetes

@lcalcote

  1. Confirm access to your Kubernetes cluster.
$ kubectl version --short
Client Version: v1.14.1
Server Version: v1.14.1
$ kubectl get nodes
NAME             STATUS   ROLES    AGE   VERSION
docker-desktop   Ready    master   10m   v1.14.1

Prereq

v1.9 or higher

Relating to

Service Meshes

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

minimal capabilities required to qualify as a container orchestrator

Service meshes generally rely on these underlying layers.

Which is why...

 I have an API gateway.

@lcalcote

Microservices API Gateways

north-south vs. east-west

Which is why...

 I have client-side libraries.

@lcalcote

Enforcing consistency is challenging.

Foo Container

Flow Control

Foo Pod

Go Library
A v1

Network Stack

Service Discovery

Circuit Breaking

Application / Business Logic

Bar Container

Flow Control

Bar Pod

Go Library
A v2

Network Stack

Service Discovery

Circuit Breaking

Application / Business Logic

Baz Container

Flow Control

Baz Pod

Java Library
B v1

Network Stack

Service Discovery

Circuit Breaking

Application / Business Logic

Retry Budgets

Rate Limiting

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

What do we need?

• Observability

• Logging
• Metrics
• Tracing

• Traffic Control

• Resiliency

• Efficiency
• Security

• Policy

@lcalcote

...a Service Mesh

@lcalcote

DEV

OPS

Decoupling at Layer 5

where Dev and Ops meet

Problem: too much infrastructure code in services

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

Q&A

Service Mesh Architectures

Service Mesh Architecture

@lcalcote

Data Plane

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

Ingress Gateway

Egress Gateway

Service Mesh Architecture

@lcalcote

No control plane? Not a service mesh.

Egress Gateway

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, configuration, and platform integration.
  • Takes a set of isolated stateless sidecar proxies and turns them into a service mesh.
  • Does not touch any packets/requests in the data path.

Ingress Gateway

Service Mesh 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, configuration, and platform integration.
  • Takes a set of isolated stateless sidecar proxies and turns them into a service mesh.
  • Does not touch any packets/requests in the data path.

You need a management plane.

Ingress Gateway

Egress Gateway

Management
Plane

  • Provides governance, multi-mesh and multi-cluster management, backend system integration, expanded policy and application integration.

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

application traffic

Application traffic

application namespace

telemetry reports

Istio Architecture

@lcalcote

Galley

Ingress Gateway

Egress Gateway

@layer5

layer5.io/landscape

Our service mesh of study: Istio

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

Galley

Ingress Gateway

Egress Gateway

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

What's Pilot for?

@lcalcote

provides service discovery to sidecars

manages sidecar configuration

Pilot

Citadel

the head of the ship

Mixer

istio-system namespace

system of record for service mesh

}

provides abstraction from underlying platforms

Galley

Control Plane

What's Mixer for?

  • Point of integration with infrastructure back ends
    • Intermediates between Istio and back ends, 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

an attribute-processing and routing machine

operator-focused

  1. Precondition checking
  2. Quota management
  3. Telemetry reporting

Pilot

Citadel

Mixer

istio-system namespace

Galley

Control Plane

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

What's Citadel for?

@lcalcote

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

security at scale

security by default

Orchestrate Key & Certificate:

  • Generation
  • Deployment
  • Rotation
  • Revocation

 

Pilot

Citadel

Mixer

istio-system namespace

Galley

Control Plane

Download and Deploy Istio Resources

@lcalcote

  1. Download Istio

     
  2. Familiarize with `istioctl`

     
  3. Install Istio custom resources

     
  4. Verify custom resource installation

github.com/layer5io/istio-service-mesh-workshop

curl -L https://git.io/getLatestIstio | ISTIO_VERSION=1.1.7 sh -
istioctl version
for i in install/kubernetes/helm/istio-init/files/crd*yaml; 
do kubectl apply -f $i; done
kubectl get crd | grep istio

Lab 1

Deploy Istio

@lcalcote

  1. Install Istio

     
  2. Find control plane namespace

     
  3. Inspect control plane services

     
  4. Inspect control plane components
kubectl apply -f install/kubernetes/istio-demo.yaml
kubectl get namespaces
kubectl get svc -n istio-system
kubectl get pod -n istio-system

Lab 1

github.com/layer5io/istio-service-mesh-workshop

Q&A

Break

Deploy Sample App

@lcalcote

  1. Multi-language, multi-service application

  2. Automatic vs manual  sidecar injection

  3. Verify install

Sample app is in your release distribution folder at samples/bookinfo

Lab 2

BookInfo Sample App

Reviews v1

Reviews Pod

Reviews v2

Reviews v3

Product Pod

Details Container

Details Pod

Ratings Container

Ratings Pod

Product Container

Reviews Service

Ratings Service

Details Service

Product Service

BookInfo Sample App on Service Mesh

Reviews v1

Reviews Pod

@lcalcote

Reviews v2

Reviews v3

Product Pod

Details Container

Details Pod

Ratings Container

Ratings Pod

Product Container

Envoy sidecar

Envoy sidecar

Envoy sidecar

Envoy sidecar

Envoy sidecar

Reviews Service

Enovy sidecar

Envoy ingress

Product Service

Ratings Service

Details Service

Sidecar Injection

@lcalcote

Automatic sidecar injection leverages Kubernetes' Mutating Webhook Admission Controller.


  1. Verify whether your Kubernetes deployment supports these APIs by executing:



  2. Inspect the istio-sidecar-injector webhook:


If your environment does NOT this API, then you may manually inject the istio sidecar.

Lab 2

github.com/layer5io/istio-service-mesh-workshop

kubectl get mutatingwebhookconfigurations
kubectl get mutatingwebhookconfigurations istio-sidecar-injector -o yaml
kubectl api-versions | grep admissionregistration

Sidecars proxy can be either manually or automatically injected into your pods.

Deploy Sample App with Automatic Sidecar Injection

@lcalcote

  1. Verify presence of the sidecar injector

Envoy ingress

kubectl -n istio-system get deployment -l istio=sidecar-injector

Lab 2

github.com/layer5io/istio-service-mesh-workshop

2.   Confirm namespace label

kubectl get ns -L istio-injection

 Deploy Sample App with Manual Sidecar Injection

@lcalcote

Envoy ingress

In namespaces without the istio-injection label, you can use istioctl kube-inject to manually inject Envoy containers in your application pods before deploying them:

istioctl kube-inject -f <your-app-spec>.yaml | kubectl apply -f -

Lab 2

github.com/layer5io/istio-service-mesh-workshop

Expose BookInfo via Istio Ingress Gateway

@lcalcote

  1. Inspecting the Istio Ingress Gateway
  2. Configure Istio Ingress Gateway for Bookinfo
  3. Inspect the Istio proxy of the productpage pod

Istio  ingress gateway

application traffic

Lab 3

github.com/layer5io/istio-service-mesh-workshop

Telemetry

Load Generation

a multi-service mesh management plane

Service Mesh Interface (SMI)

Lab 4

@lcalcote

layer5.io/blog/a-standard-interface-for-service-meshes

Meshery

Configuration

Security

Telemetry

Control Plane

Data
Plane

service mesh ns

Foo Pod

Proxy Sidecar

Service Foo

Foo Container

Bar Pod

Proxy Sidecar

Service Bar

Bar Container

Out-of-band telemetry propagation

Control flow

application traffic

http / gRPC

Application traffic

application namespace

Meshery Architecture

@lcalcote

Ingress Gateway

Egress Gateway

Management
Plane

meshery

adapter

gRPC

kube-api

kube-system

@lcalcote

layer5.io/meshery

Deploy Management Plane

Lab 4

Management
Plane

Provides expanded governance, backend system integration, expanded policy, and dynamic application and mesh configuration.

Control Plane

Data Plane

sudo curl -L https://git.io/meshery -o /usr/local/bin/meshery
sudo chmod a+x /usr/local/bin/meshery
meshery start
  • Generate load on Bookinfo
  • View in monitoring tools
  1. Install Meshery

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

®

Pilot

Citadel

Mixer

istio-system namespace

Galley

Control Plane

Metrics

@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

Lab 4

  1. Expose services with NodePort:



     
  2. Find port assigned to Prometheus:
kubectl -n istio-system edit svc prometheus
kubectl -n istio-system get svc prometheus

Metrics Dashboard

Grafana

@lcalcote

Lab 4

  1. Expose services with NodePort:



     
  2. Find port assigned to Grafana:
kubectl -n istio-system edit svc grafana
kubectl -n istio-system get svc grafana

@lcalcote

Lab 4

Distributed Tracing

Jaeger

github.com/layer5io/istio-service-mesh-workshop

Distributed Tracing

Jaeger

@lcalcote

The istio-proxy collects and propagates the following headers from the incoming request to any outgoing requests:

  • x-request-id
  • x-b3-traceid
  • x-b3-spanid
  • x-b3-parentspanid
  • x-b3-sampled
  • x-b3-flags
  • x-ot-span-context

Lab 4

  1. Expose services with NodePort:



     
  2. Find port assigned to Jaeger:
kubectl -n istio-system edit svc tracing
kubectl -n istio-system get svc tracing

github.com/layer5io/istio-service-mesh-workshop

Services Observation

Kiali

@lcalcote

Lab 4

  1. Expose services with NodePort:



     
  2. Find port assigned to Kiali:
kubectl -n istio-system edit svc kiali
kubectl -n istio-system get svc kiali

github.com/layer5io/istio-service-mesh-workshop

Configuration

Security

Telemetry

Control Plane

Data
Plane

service mesh ns

Foo Pod

Proxy Sidecar

Service Foo

Foo Container

Bar Pod

Proxy Sidecar

Service Bar

Bar Container

Out-of-band telemetry propagation

Control flow

Application traffic

application namespace

Istio v1.0 Multi-Cluster

@lcalcote

Ingress Gateway

kube-api

kube-system

Barz Pod

Proxy Sidecar

Service Bar

Baz Container

application namespace

kube-api

kube-system

LOCAL CLUSTER

REMOTE CLUSTER

Egress Gateway

injector

Shared Root CA

Q&A

Break

Request Routing and Canary Testing

@lcalcote

  1. Configure the default route for all services to V1
  2. Content based routing
  3. Canary Testing - Traffic Shifting
     

layer5.io

kubectl apply -f samples/bookinfo/networking/destination-rule-all-mtls.yaml

Lab 5

Timeouts & Retries

@lcalcote

Web

Service Foo

Timeout = 600ms
Retries = 3

Timeout = 300ms
Retries = 3

Timeout = 900ms
Retries = 3

Service Bar

Database

Timeout = 500ms
Retries = 3

Timeout = 300ms
Retries = 3

Timeout = 900ms
Retries = 3

Deadlines

Web

Service Foo

Deadline = 600ms

Deadline = 496ms

Service Bar

Database

Deadline = 428ms

Deadline=180ms

Elapsed=104ms

Elapsed=68ms

layer5.io

Elapsed=248ms

Fault Injection and Rate-Limiting

@lcalcote

  1. Inject a route rule to create a fault using HTTP delay
  2. Inject a route rule to create a fault using HTTP abort
  3. Verify fault injection

Lab 6

Circuit Breaking

@lcalcote

  1. Deploy a client for the app
    1. With manual sidecar injection:
  2. Initial test calls from client to server
  3. Time to trip the circuit

Lab 7

Q&A

Mutual TLS & Identity Verification

@lcalcote

  1. Verify mTLS
  2. Understanding SPIFFE

Lab 8

Service Mesh Deployment Models

If we have time...

Client

Edge Cache

Istio Gateway

(envoy)

Cache Generator

Collection of VMs running APIs

service mesh

Istio VirtualService

Istio VirtualService

Istio ServiceEntry

Situation:

  • existing services running on VMs (that have little to no service-to-service traffic).
  • nearly all traffic flows from client to the service and back to client.

 

Benefits:

  • gain granular traffic control (e.g path rewrites).
  • detailed service monitoring without immediately deploying a thousand sidecars.

Ingress

Istio - The Weather Company's Journey

Out-of-band telemetry propagation

Application traffic

@lcalcote

Control flow

Proxy per Node

Service A

Service A

Service A

linkerd

Node (server)

Service A

Service A

Service B

linkerd

Node (server)

Service A

Service A

Service C

linkerd

Node (server)

Advantages:

  • Less (memory) overhead.

  • Simpler distribution of configuration information.

  • primarily physical or virtual server based; good for large monolithic applications.
     

Disadvantages:

  • Coarse support for encryption of service-to-service communication, instead host-to-host encryption and authentication policies.

  • Blast radius of a proxy failure includes all applications on the node, which is essentially equivalent to losing the node itself.

  • Not a transparent entity, services must be aware of its existence.

layer5.io/books

Advantages:

  • Good starting point for building a brand-new microservices architecture or for migrating from a monolith.

Disadvantages:

  • When the number of services increase, it becomes difficult to manage.

Router "Mesh"

Fabric Model

Advantages:

  • Granular encryption of service-to-service communication.

  • Can be gradually added to an existing cluster without central coordination.

Disadvantages:

  • Lack of central coordination. Difficult to scale operationally.

Ingress or Edge Proxy

Advantages:

  • Works with existing services that can be broken down over time.

Disadvantages:

  • Is missing the benefits of service-to-service visibility and control.

Q&A

the Service Mesh Community

Layer5.io

Meshery

@layer5

layer5.io/subscribe

O'Reilly Live Online Training - Introduction to Istio

By Lee Calcote

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O'Reilly Live Online Training - Introduction to Istio

Presented live online via O'Reilly - https://layer5.io/workshops

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