Technical requirements – Implementing Traffic Management, Security, and Observability with Istio

In the previous chapter, we covered site reliability engineering (SRE) and how it has helped manage production environments using DevOps practices. In this chapter, we’ll dive deep into a service mesh technology called Istio, which will help us implement SRE practices and manage our application better in production.

In this chapter, we’re going to cover the following main topics:

• Revisiting the Blog App

• Introduction to service mesh

• Introduction to Istio

• Understanding the Istio architecture

• Installing Istio

• Using Istio Ingress to allow traffic

• Securing your microservices using Istio

• Managing traffic with Istio

• Observing traffic and alerting with Istio

Technical requirements

For this chapter, we will spin up a cloud-based Kubernetes cluster, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), for the exercises. At the time of writing, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) provides a free $300 trial for 90 days, so you can go ahead and sign up for one at https://console.cloud.google.com/.

You will also need to clone the following GitHub repository for some of the exercises: https:// github.com/PacktPublishing/Modern-DevOps-Practices-2e.

You can use the Cloud Shell offering available from GCP to follow this chapter. Go to Cloud Shell and start a new session. Run the following command to clone the repository into your home directory to access the required resources:

$ git clone https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Modern-DevOps-Practices-2e.git \ modern-devops

We also need to set the project ID and enable a few GCP APIs we will use in this chapter. To do so, run the following commands:

$ PROJECT_ID=<YOUR_PROJECT_ID>

$ gcloud services enable iam.googleapis.com \

container.googleapis.com \

binaryauthorization.googleapis.com \

containeranalysis.googleapis.com \

secretmanager.googleapis.com \

cloudresourcemanager.googleapis.com \

cloudkms.googleapis.com

If you haven’t followed the previous chapters and want to start quickly with this, you can follow the next part, Setting up the baseline, though I highly recommend that you go through the last few chapters to get a flow. If you have been following the hands-on exercises in the previous chapters, feel free to skip this part.