Shulou(Shulou.com)06/02 Report--

Recently, Rancher Labs (hereinafter referred to as Rancher), a leading provider of container management software, announced support for Istio on Rancher 2.3 Preview 2, making the journey of deploying and managing Istio easy and fast.

Why choose Istio?

Istio, and the entire Service Mesh technology, is one of the brightest stars in the Kubernetes ecosystem in the last year or two. Istio adds fault tolerance, canary deployment, Amax B testing, monitoring, tracking and observability, authentication and authorization, which developers no longer need to test or write specific code to achieve. In this way, developers can focus only on their business logic and leave the rest of the work to Kubernetes and Istio.

The above statements are not new. As early as about 10 years ago, PaaS suppliers put forward a similar statement, and even fulfilled this requirement to some extent. The problem is that their products require specific languages and frameworks and can only be used in very simple applications in most cases. The user's workload is also associated with the vendor's unique solution. This means that if you want your application to use PaaS services, you may be locked in for quite a long time.

But now, for containers and Kubernetes, these restrictions and the risk of locking down no longer exist. As long as you containerize your application, Kubernetes can run it for you.

How Istio works in Rancher 2.3 Preview 2

The reason why a large number of Rancher users like the Rancher platform is that Rancher makes it extremely easy to manage and operate Kubernetes and related tools and technologies, and users do not have to worry about being locked down by specific cloud providers. Now we are taking the same approach to Istio, focusing on bringing the same experience to our users.

In Rancher 2.3 Preview, we provide users with a simple and friendly user interface to launch Istio using the tools menu in UI. The system provides a reasonable default configuration, and users can modify it as needed:

In order to monitor traffic, Istio needs to inject Envoy sidecar. In Rancher 2.3 Preview, users can inject automatic sidecar for each space name. Once you check this option, Rancher injects the sidecar container into each workload:

Rancher simplifies the installation and configuration of Istio, with a built-in Kiali-enabled dashboard for traffic and telemetry visualization, then tracking with Jaeger, and even its own Prometheus and Grafana (unlike examples for advanced monitoring).

After deploying the workload in a namespace with automatic sidecar injection enabled, you can jump to the Istio menu directory to observe the traffic from the microservice application:

Click Kiali, Jaeger, Prometheus, or Grafana, and you will enter the appropriate user interface for each tool, where you can find details and options:

As mentioned earlier, the power of Istio is that it brings features such as fault tolerance, circuit breakage, canary deployment, and so on to your services. To enable these features, you need to develop and apply the appropriate YAML files. Istio is not currently supported by Windows workloads, so it should not be enabled in the Windows cluster.

Conclusion

Istio is one of the most concerned features in the current Rancher and Kubernetes community. However, there is still a long way to go to best achieve the best practices for Istio deployment and management. In Rancher 2.3 Preview 2, our goal is to follow the philosophy of Rancher and make the journey of deploying and managing Istio easy and fast.

At the 2019 Enterprise Container Innovation Conference held by Rancher in Beijing on June 20, 2019, Zhang Hao, R & D manager of Rancher Greater China, shared a series of new features of Rancher 2.3 Preview, including formal support for Windows Kubernetes, image warehouse, image scanning, service grid, Google login, cluster template, cluster security scanning and cluster automatic expansion and scaling, etc. And demo shows how to use Istio to publish canaries in Rancher. You can reply "ECIC" in the Rancher Wechat official account (RancherLabs) background to get the full PPT download of the conference.

For release notes and installation steps, visit GitHub:

Https://github.com/rancher/rancher/releases/tag/v2.3.0-alpha5

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