Running Istio 1.5 on Minikube

Istio 1.5 is out. Istio took a very bald and big move. Istio decided to move away from microservices. Considering istio use case it makes lots of sense. As you go with microservice architecture you have several advantages like autonomy, use the best tool for the job(different languages), scale components independently, isolation and many others. However, microservices are not a free lunch and there is a downside from it. One of them is the DevOps engineering price to configure, provision, monitor and maintain several isolated services. The other one is complexity. Microservices are more complex than monolith systems. Istio took the move and went to from the microservices architecture with 5 services(Pilot, Cidatel, Telemetry, Policy, Galley, Injector) into 1 single service called istiod. This move made lots of sense.  Not only because it removed complexity but also make configuration, installation and upgrade much easier. I',m sure this move will drive more adoption.

Running Istio 1.5 in Minikube



There are some important things to keep in mind. First of all, I'm setting up 16GB for istio. Istio runs much better with more memory. It's possible to run it with 8GB if you like. If you are having issues, for sure is the memory. Crash loop back in Kubernetes most of the time is because of the lack of resources like memory.

Secondly, there are some commands that will require you to open new terminals like the minikube tunnel and dashboards. Keep in mind some of the dashboard commands like envoy and controlz require the pod name which will change, so do a kubectl get and pick the right pod name. Keep in mind istio is deployed in a different namespace called (istio-system) in order to access it via kubectl you need to pass -n istio-system at the end of each command.

Here are some screenshots of Istio 1.5 running on my machine.

kubectl get all (show all resources from the demo app)

kubectl get all -n istio-system (show all resources from istio namespace/installation)

istioctl dashboard kiali (show kiali service-mesh graph visualization of the demo app).

istioctl dashboard Prometheus (show Prometheus observability ui).

istioctl dashboard envoy $productpage_pod_name

istioctl dashboard controlz $istiod-pod-name -n istio-system

Product Page demo app running on my chrome

istioctl dashboard jaeger

istioctl dashbaord grafana

Istio 1.5 it's very sexy. One of the biggest downsides of istio just got fixed(complexity of configuration, maintained and upgrade). The only thing we still need to be paying attention to is overhead.  The last time I check was around 10ms. I'm sure istio will get faster and better.

Cheers,
Diego Pacheco


Popular posts from this blog

C Unit Testing with Check

Image
When I start on IT, several years ago(+15), C was the first language that I learned. But was not the first language I mastered and deployed in production which was...surprisingly Visual Basic 6.0. However, when I learned C or any language back on that old and arcane time noddy was into testing. However now is impossible to work professionally in any language without tests. C is a low-level language but still kicks ass and has several interesting libs/frameworks. People use to fear C a lot because of lack of syntactical sugar but once you get used to it is not that hard at all. Today I want to show how you can do Unit Testing with C. I will not show how to do Unit Testing with C++ but with C ANSI actually. We will be using Check a unit test lib for C ANSI.
read more »

Having fun with Zig Language

Image
Zig is a general-purpose language created in 2016 by Andrew Kelly .  Zig aims to fix the issues C language has while being pragmatic and simple at the same time. Zig really shines as being simple by not having any hidden control flows, not having hidden memory allocations, no pre-processors, and no macros. Basically, it's one language and one language only. Since pre-processors and macros can get really complex and become their own universe. Sure it's not the Zig Philosophy.  Zig Compiler(Zig cc) also is a C compiler, and the interoperability from C to Zig is very good. Clearly, we can see influence from other languages like Go and Rust; however, Zig is pretty unique and different from Go and Rust.  Zig is fast. Zig is perfect for system programming. I bet we will see a lot of solutions being built in Zig. As a languages aficionado, I like to learn at least one language per year and sometimes more; Zig was my 2021 pick, did not regret it. Even if you dont use all languages in p
Keep reading

HMAC in Java

Image
In 2018 AWS CTO(Vogels) said : "Security is everyone's job". For the last 2 years, there was so many famous and big data leaks and breaks that made that statement be very true more than ever. Security often could mean worst performance and worst user experience so in order to get it right you really need to think about the designs before jumping into to code and consider performance and user experience has main requirements.  I was thinking about writing about how to do HMAC in Java for a while and recently Redis 6.0.0 come out and to my surprise, there was a refactoring on the password part in order to use HMAC.  Security easily could scare engineers often because it is not something well spread yet but I believe this will change soon. It does not matter if you have to deal with PII Data or not, security is super relevant because everybody is running their workloads at the cloud or with IoT and Edge devices which means more distribution, more code, more points of fail
read more »