Installing ISTIO & KUBECTL

Introduction

Istio is an open-source service mesh platform that simplifies managing microservices architectures by providing a unified way to connect, secure, control, and monitor services. It operates at the application layer, managing service-to-service communication within a distributed system.

kubectl is the command-line tool used to interact with Kubernetes clusters. It allows users to manage Kubernetes resources, deploy applications, inspect and debug workloads, and perform administrative tasks within the cluster.

Installing and configuring Istio and Kubectl

Note: In a typical deployment, it is recommended to use a separate virtual machine (VM) as a "build VM" for connecting to the Kubernetes cluster and managing application build activities. For the demo environment, the NFS VM is used as the build machine.

• Connect to the NFS VM using the SSH credentials specific to your environment. For Stackbill, the default operating system for VMs is Ubuntu 22.x, and the default username is ubuntu

• Once logged in as the ubuntu user, switch to the root account for elevated privileges. Use the following command.

sudo -i

• Go to the /usr/local/src directory, where all scripts will be stored as temporary location.

cd /usr/local/src

• Run the following commands to download the latest version of kubectl and its checksum file.

curl -LO https://dl.k8s.io/release/$(curl -L -s https://dl.k8s.io/release/stable.txt)/bin/linux/amd64/kubectl

curl -LO https://dl.k8s.io/release/$(curl -L -s https://dl.k8s.io/release/stable.txt)/bin/linux/amd64/kubectl.sha256

• Verify the checksum

echo "$(cat kubectl.sha256) kubectl" | sha256sum –check

• Install kubectl using below command

install -o root -g root -m 0755 kubectl /usr/local/bin/kubectl

• Provide execution permissions

chmod +x kubectl

• Create a local directory

mkdir -p ~/.local/bin

• Move the kubectl binary

mv ./kubectl ~/.local/bin/kubectl

• Verify the installation

kubectl version –client

• Create a directory to store kubernetes configuration file.

mkdir /root/.kube

• Copy the kubeconfig file from the Kubernetes master node to .kube directory. To do that, login into kubernetes master VM and execute the below command.

vi /root/.kube/config

• Copy the config file and paste it in the .kube folder.

• Validate Kubernetes access using below command.

Kubectl get nodes

• If you see a list of nodes, the kubectl configuration is correct.

Istio Configuration

• Use the following command to download Istio

curl -L https://istio.io/downloadIstio | ISTIO_VERSION=1.20.3 sh -

• Navigate to the bin directory within the Istio installation folder.

cd istio-1.20.3/bin

• Copy the istioctl binary to /usr/local/bin

cp istioctl /usr/local/bin

• Execute the below command to install Istio component

istioctl install

• After the installation, retrieve the Ingress Gateway service details using below command.

kubectl get svc -n istio-system

• Identify the HTTP and HTTPS ports from the Ingress Gateway output.

• Update your load balancer to allow these ports, enabling public traffic to flow to the Kubernetes environment. For example, the ports might be 30219 for HTTP and 32347 for HTTPS in your environment.