The Istio service mesh continues its quarterly release cadence with version 1.6. After major changes in release 1.5 to the control plane architecture, notably moving from a set of microservices to a monolithic Istiod service, and the introduction of a new, unified model for extending Istio and its Envoy proxies using WebAssembly, Istio 1.6 may seem tame in comparison, but it still offers a large number of smaller enhancements with a focus on operability. We will look at several of the highlights.
Installation and Configuration Management
Canary Support for Istio Upgrades
In order to reduce risk when performing version upgrades of the Istio control plane in a production cluster, users can now deploy multiple releases of Istiod in the same cluster and gradually migrate pods to the newer version. The istioctl
command-line tool supports assigning names to versions when installing new control plane versions. These names can then be used to assign workloads to a specific Istiod version running in the service mesh.
Istio Operator Support for Remote Control Planes
The Istio Operator and its Custom Resource Definition (CRD), IstioOperator
, now support the experimental ability to configure the data plane (Envoy proxy sidecar mesh) in one Kubernetes cluster to use the control plane (Istiod) in a remote cluster. A single control plane can support managing the data planes in multiple meshes.
preview
Installation Profile for Experimental Features
istioctl
now supports a preview
installation profile. This new profile enables experimental features to make it easier for users to try them.
Helm Installation Removed
While istioctl
and the operator still use Helm charts under the hood, release 1.6 removes the previously-deprecated support for users to deploy and manage their Istio meshes by using the helm
command-line tool directly.
Traffic Management
Route Configuration Delegation for VirtualService
The VirtualService
resource now has an optional delegate
parameter for HTTP path-based routes. This feature can be used as a kind of “namespace” boundary when defining a number of routes for one service.
For example, your service architecture may have a single endpoint which acts as a portal for multiple backends. Requests matching https://portal.example.com/login
may go to an authentication service. https://portal.example.com/search
requests would route to a search index frontend.
A payment service may handle requests for https://portal.example.com/checkout
. These services are probably each managed by a separate team that needs permission to update the configuration for their endpoints but for no one else’s. In this case, cluster admins could create one top-level VirtualService
object for portal.example.com
which then delegates the configuration details for each of the URI paths to three separate VirtualService
objects. Kubernetes RBAC roles for each team could then grant them permission to change only their endpoint’s VirtualService
object’s specification.
WorkloadEntry
for External Workloads
Release 1.6 adds a new resource type, WorkloadEntry
, to support workloads which lie outside an Istio mesh’s Kubernetes cluster. Users can install Envoy proxies on their virtual or physical servers to allow the workloads on these hosts to join an Istio mesh, enabling seamless interaction with all the workloads in the mesh.
Customized Proxy Configurations for Workloads
Users can now override the default configuration for their mesh’s default Envoy proxy on a per-workload basis by adding the annotation proxy.istio.io/config
to the workload’s PodSpec
and setting to an inline ProxyConfig
definition.
Telemetry
Prometheus Configuration
The Istio control plane workloads and proxies now all have default annotations to configure metric scraping by Prometheus. Note that the defaults are set to work when installing Prometheus with istioctl
. This Prometheus configuration does not have application security features enabled. You should consider directly managing Prometheus in your production clusters to ensure its security and scalability.
Metric Customizations
Istio telemetry version 2 adds support for metrics customization options. Users can configure metric labels based on connection request and response attributes.
Istio 1.6 may not be quite as flashy as the monumental 1.5 release, but it still offers a number of solid improvements that add useful features to Istio while simultaneously improving its operability experience.
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