istio-upgrades

What's the point of this repository?

To help simulate the upgrade from Istio 1.3 -> 1.4 -> 1.6

What's in this respository?

Resources from the istio repoistory (including resources from different versions) have been added to help reduce bandwidth requirements. The bookinfo sample is also included to help simulate an application.

How do you execute the upgrade strategy?

Prerequisites

1. Docker Desktop a. you'll need to allow at least 8Gb memory
2. kind
3. kubectl
4. Helm v2 supplied through asdf

Steps

1. Initial setup:

$ make setup

What does this do?

• Creates a kind cluster and installs kubernetes 1.5.11
• Install Istio version 1.3.3 using Helm v2
• Install the bookinfo sample application

This should allow you to access the bookinfo sample project from your browser - bookinfo

2. Upgrade Istio to 1.4.10

$ make upgrade-istio-to-1.4.10

What does this do?

• Performs a Helm upgrade to the newer istio-init chart
• Performs a Helm upgrade to the newer istio chart

3. Upgrade Istio to 1.6.13

$ make upgrade-istio-to-1.6.13

What does this do?

• Patch the istio-galley deployment to disable validation.
• Delete the istio-galley validating webhook should one exist.
• Download the versiob 1.6.13 of the istioctl binary from GitHub.
• Initialise the istio operator using istioctl.
• Create a default instance of an Istio Operator.
• Label the default namespace with istio.io/rev=1-6-13 to point to the latest 1.6.13 revision and remove the istio-injection label.
• Scale down the deployments managed by Helm from the previous release (At this point we need to prevent the istio-ingressgateway from being scaled down as we use this as our ingress").
• Perform a restart of all deployments in the default namespace.
• Patch the istio-ingressgateway, replace the nodePort values for the HTTP & HTTPS port mappings (this ensures we can still access the sample app due to the fixed port mapping kind cluster configuration).

How do I view the sample app?

curl http://localhost/productpage

or Navigate to http://localhost/productpage in your browser.

How to I view a Graph of the traffic flow?

$ ./istio/1.6.13/istioctl dashboard kiali

E.g

Useful commands during upgrade

• kubectl get pods -n istio-system
• kubectl get pods -n istio-operator
• kubectl get pods -n default
• curl -s -o /dev/null -w %{http_code} http://127.0.0.1/productpage

Istio 1.3.3

• ./istio/1.3.3/istioctl version
• ./istio/1.3.3/istioctl ps
• ./istio/1.3.3/istioctl verify-install
• ./istio/1.3.3/istioctl dashboard kiali

Istio 1.4.10

• ./istio/1.4.10/istioctl version
• ./istio/1.4.10/istioctl ps
• ./istio/1.4.10/istioctl dashboard kiali

Istio 1.6.13

• ./istio/1.6.13/istioctl version
• ./istio/1.6.13/istioctl ps
• ./istio/1.6.13/istioctl analyze
• ./istio/1.6.13/istioctl verify-install
• ./istio/1.6.13/istioctl dashboard kiali

References

• https://istio.io/v1.3/docs/setup/install/helm/#option-2-install-with-helm-and-tiller-via-helm-install
• https://istio.io/v1.4/docs/setup/upgrade/cni-helm-upgrade/
• https://istio.io/v1.6/docs/setup/upgrade/#upgrading-from-1.4
• https://github.com/istio/istio/tree/master/samples/bookinfo

Troubleshooting

Should the bookinfo applications be unavailable when attempting to navigate to them via http://localhost/productpage then it might be that the nodePort has been updated within the istio-ingressgateway service within the istio-system namespace. Execute the following to update the nodePort values:

kubectl -n istio-system patch service istio-ingressgateway --type='json' -p '[{"op":"replace","path":"/spec/ports/1/nodePort","value":31380},{"op":"replace","path":"/spec/ports/2/nodePort","value":31390}]'