Implementing Istio in AWS

What Is Istio?

Istio is an open-source service mesh platform that provides a way to easily manage and secure microservices. It allows coordinating traffic management, service discovery, load balancing, and more, all without the need for code changes in the underlying services.

Some key features of Istio include:

• Traffic management: Istio allows for fine-grained control over how traffic is routed between microservices, including the ability to split traffic between different versions of a service, or to route traffic based on certain criteria (such as user location or device type).
• Service discovery: Istio automatically discovers and configures service endpoints, making it easy to connect and communicate with different microservices.
• Load balancing: Istio automatically distributes incoming traffic across different instances of a service, ensuring that each service is running at optimal capacity and that traffic is evenly distributed.
• Security: Istio provides built-in security features for securing containerized applications, including mutual authentication between services, encryption of service-to-service communication, and access controls to restrict access to certain services.
• Monitoring and tracing: Istio provides built-in metrics, logging, and tracing capabilities, making it easy to monitor and troubleshoot services.

How Istio Works

Istio works by deploying a set of proxies, called Envoy, to each service in the application. These proxies act as a "data plane" that sits between the application and the network. The proxies handle all incoming and outgoing traffic and enforce the rules and policies specified in Istio's configuration.

Istio also includes a "control plane" component, which is responsible for managing the configuration of the proxies and ensuring that the rules and policies are being enforced correctly. This component communicates with the proxies and updates their configuration as needed.

Traffic Management

Istio uses a declarative configuration model, where developers specify how traffic should be handled without having to manually configure each service. This configuration is managed by the Istio "control plane" component, which communicates with the proxies and updates their configuration as needed.

Some of the key traffic management features provided by Istio include:

• Load balancing: Istio allows for fine-grained control of traffic between microservices, including the ability to configure different load balancing algorithms and policies.
• Traffic shaping: Istio provides features such as rate limiting and request/response rate limiting to shape traffic between microservices.
• Circuit-breaking: Istio allows developers to configure circuit-breaking policies to automatically stop traffic to a service if it is experiencing a high level of errors or latency.
• Routing: Istio allows for the routing of traffic between different versions of a service or between different environments (e.g., staging vs. production).

Security

Istio provides various built-in security features, including:

• Mutual Transport Layer Security (mTLS): Istio enforces mutual TLS between services, providing secure communication between services.
• Service-to-service authentication: Istio provides built-in service-to-service authentication, allowing services to authenticate each other before allowing traffic to pass through.
• Authorization: Istio provides built-in authorization features, allowing developers to configure fine-grained access controls for services based on their roles and permissions.
• Auditing and logging: Istio provides detailed metrics and tracing information for all traffic passing through the service mesh, which can be used for auditing and logging purposes.

Observability

Some of the key observability features provided by Istio include:

• Metrics: Istio provides detailed metrics for all traffic passing through the service mesh, including information on request rates, response times, error rates, and more. This allows for better visibility into how microservices are interacting with each other.
• Tracing: Istio provides tracing information for all traffic passing through the service mesh, allowing developers to understand how requests are flowing through the application and identify any bottlenecks or issues.
• Logging: Istio provides detailed logging information for all traffic passing through the service mesh, allowing developers to understand how requests are being handled and identify any issues.
• Dashboards: Istio provides a set of built-in dashboards that allow developers to visualize metrics and tracing information, making it easier to understand the behavior of microservices-based applications.

Quick Tutorial: Deploying Istio on AWS EKS

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service is a managed Kubernetes service that takes care of provisioning, scaling, and managing the underlying infrastructure, as well as patching and upgrading the Kubernetes control plane.

Installing Istio

Istio can be installed on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) using Helm charts. Helm is a package manager for Kubernetes that allows for easy installation and management of Kubernetes applications.

The following steps can be used to install Istio on EKS using Helm:

1. Install Helm on your local machine by following the instructions on the Helm website.
2. Add the Istio Helm repository by running the following command:

helm repo add istio.io <https://storage.googleapis.com/istio-release/releases/1.9.0/charts/>

1. Create a namespace for Istio by running the following command:

kubectl create namespace istio-system

1. Use Helm to install Istio by running the following command:

helm install istio-init istio.io/istio-init --- namespace istio-system

1. Wait for all pods in the istio-system namespace to be in a Running state.
2. Install Istio by running the following command:

helm install istio istio.io/istio --- namespace istio-system --- wait

Istio provides a convenient script which downloads and extract the latest Istio release for you:

curl -L <https://git.io/getLatestIstio> | sh -

cd istio-1.*

Installing Bookinfo via kubectl

Bookinfo is a sample application that demonstrates some of Istio's features. Download the Bookinfo YAML configuration from here. Once Istio is installed, you can install the Bookinfo application to test it out.

1. Install the Bookinfo application by running the following command:

kubectl apply -f <path-to-bookinfo-yaml>

1. Verify that the Bookinfo pods are running by running the following command:

kubectl get pods --- namespace istio-system

Installing Bookinfo via Istio operator

Here is another way to deploy the Bookinfo app, using the Istio operator:

1. Create an operator group and a subscription for the operator

kubectl apply -f - <<EOF
apiVersion: operators.coreos.com/v1
kind: OperatorGroup
metadata:
  name: istio-operator-group
spec:
  targetNamespaces:
  - istio-system
---
apiVersion: operators.coreos.com/v1alpha1
kind: Subscription
metadata:
  name: istio-operator
  namespace: istio-system
spec:
  channel: alpha
  name: istio-operator
  source: istio-operator
  sourceNamespace: istio-operator
EOF

1. Wait for the Istio operator to be running by running the following command:

kubectl get pods --- namespace istio-system

1. Install the Bookinfo application by running the following command:

kubectl apply -f - <<EOF
apiVersion: install.istio.io/v1alpha1
kind: IstioOperator
metadata:
  namespace: istio-system
  name: example-istioperator
spec:
  profile: demo
  components:
    ingressGateways:
    - name: istio-ingressgateway
      enabled: true
      k8s:
        service:
          type: LoadBalancer
    egressGateways:
    - name: istio-egressgate

Conclusion

In conclusion, Istio is an open-source service mesh that provides traffic management, policy enforcement, and telemetry collection for microservices. It can be installed on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) using Helm charts.

The process of installing Istio involves adding the Istio Helm repository, creating a namespace for Istio, and using Helm to install Istio and its dependencies. Additionally, you can test your Istio installation by installing the Bookinfo application. In an AWS environment, with EKS, Istio can be easily deployed and managed to provide a secure and efficient service mesh for microservices.