This page provides information to help you plan a new installation of Anthos Service Mesh.
Customize the control plane
The features that Anthos Service Mesh supports differ between platforms. We recommend
that you review the Supported features to
learn which features are supported on your platform. Some features are enabled
by default, and others you can optionally enable by creating an
IstioOperator
overlay file.
When you run asmcli install
, you can customize the control plane by specifying
the --custom_overlay
option with the overlay file.
The
anthos-service-mesh
package in GitHub contain many overlay files. These files contain common
customizations to the default configuration. You can use these files as they
are, or you can make additional changes to them as needed. Some of the files
are required to
enable optional Anthos Service Mesh features.
The anthos-service-mesh
package is downloaded when you run asmcli
to
validate your project and cluster.
When you install Anthos Service Mesh using asmcli install
, you
can specify one or more overlay files with the --option
or --custom_overlay
.
If you don't need to make any changes to the files in the anthos-service-mesh
repository, you can use --option
, and the script fetches the file from GitHub
for you. Otherwise, you can make changes to the overlay file, and then use the
--custom_overlay
option to pass it to the asmcli
.
Choose a Certificate Authority
You can use Anthos Service Mesh certificate authority (Mesh CA) or Istio CA as the certificate authority (CA) for issuing mutual TLS (mTLS) certificates.
Unless you require a custom CA, such as HashiCorp Vault, we recommend that you use Mesh CA for the following reasons:
- Mesh CA is a highly reliable and scalable service that is optimized for dynamically scaled workloads on Google Cloud.
- With Mesh CA, Google manages the security and availability of the CA backend.
- Mesh CA lets you rely on a single root of trust across clusters.
Certificates from Mesh CA include the following data about your application's services:
- The Google Cloud project ID
- The GKE namespace
- The GKE service account name
Prepare gateway configuration
Anthos Service Mesh gives you the option to deploy and manage gateways as part of your service mesh. A gateway describes a load balancer operating at the edge of the mesh receiving incoming or outgoing HTTP/TCP connections. Gateways are Envoy proxies that provide you with fine-grained control over traffic entering and leaving the mesh.
By default, asmcli
doesn't install the istio-ingressgateway
. We
recommend that you deploy and manage the control plane and gateways separately.
For more information, see
Installing and upgrading gateways. If you need the
default istio-ingressgateway
installed with the in-cluster control plane,
include the --option legacy-default-ingressgateway
argument.