Mesh Week

A week of Istio goodness (with focus for the exam).

CNCF announced a new certification called Istio Certified Associate (ICA). Join Peter Jausovec, Marino Wijay, and Alessandro Vozza, three Istio, Cilium, Kubernetes, and overall cloud-native experts, for a series of live streams called Mesh Week.

Each live stream will be about 1 hour and will focus on a different topic from the Istio Certified associate exam curriculum. We’ll explain the concepts, talk about them, and see them in practice with hands-on demos. There will also be plenty of opportunities to ask questions.

These sessions are for anyone interested in Istio and preparing for the Istio Certified Associate exam. All you need to participate is a computer with Kind installed. Basic knowledge of Kubernetes and Docker is required.

Schedule

Session 1: Istio installation, upgrade & configuration
Session 2: Traffic management
Session 3: Resiliency and fault injection
Session 4: Securing workloads
Session 5: Advanced scenarios

Session 1: Istio installation, upgrade & configuration

Watch the recording

To start Mesh Week, we’ll go through the Istio installation topic. You’ll learn about Istio installation profiles, how to install Istio using Istio CLI (istioctl), how to customize the installation using the Istio Operator API, and how to install Istio using Helm charts.

Areas of focus from the Istio Certified Associate exam curriculum:

Using the Istio CLI to install a basic cluster
Customizing the Istio installation with the IstioOperator API
Using overlays to manage Istio component settings

Tips

Verify the installation with istioctl verify-install
Get the IstioOperator YAML for a configuration profile with istioctl profile dump [profile_name]
Learn where to configure global mesh settings and individual components (pilot, ingressGatways, egressGateways)

Here's an example of an IstioOperator resource that shows where (and how) to configure different components:

apiVersion: install.istio.io/v1alpha1
# Reference: https://istio.io/latest/docs/reference/config/istio.operator.v1alpha1/
kind: IstioOperator 
spec:
  # Configuration profile used as base for installation
  # Other settings you can configure on this level:
  # namespace, hub, revision, tag
  profile: demo

  # Mesh configuration settings: https://istio.io/latest/docs/reference/config/istio.mesh.v1alpha1/
  meshConfig: 
    accessLogFile: /dev/stdout

  # Individual components you can configure: https://istio.io/latest/docs/reference/config/istio.operator.v1alpha1/#IstioComponentSetSpec
  # Includes base, pilot, cni, ztunnel, ingressGatways, egressGatways, istiodRemote
  components:
    # pilot: ..
    # cni: ...
    egressGateways:
    # There can be more than 1 egress gateway - note that to customize a gateway
    # that already exists in the profile (e.g. demo in this case), you need to use the default names
      - name: istio-egressgateway
        enabled: false
    ingressGateways:
        # Disable the default ingress gateway
      - name: istio-ingressgateway
        enabled: false
        # Enable a new ingress gateway
      - name: peters-gateway
        enabled: true
        namespace: custom-ns-name
        label:
          app: custom-label
        # Customize the k8s resources: https://istio.io/latest/docs/reference/config/istio.operator.v1alpha1/#KubernetesResourcesSpec
        k8s:
          resources:
            requests:
              cpu: 5m
              memory: 20Mi