Upgrading Anthos Service Mesh on premises

This guide explains how to upgrade Anthos Service Mesh from version 1.4.5+ or 1.5.4+ to version 1.5.10 on GKE on VMware.

Redeploying the Anthos Service Mesh control plane components takes about 5 to 10 minutes to complete. Additionally, you need to inject new sidecar proxies in all of your workloads so they are updated with the current Anthos Service Mesh version. The time it takes to update the sidecar proxies depends on many factors, such as the number of pods, the number of nodes, deployment scaling settings, pod disruption budgets, and other configuration settings. A rough estimate of the time that it takes to update the sidecar proxies is 100 pods per minute.

Preparing for the upgrade

This section outlines the steps that you take to upgrade Anthos Service Mesh.

  1. Review the Supported features and this guide to become familiar with the features and the upgrade process.

  2. If you enabled optional features when you installed the previous version of Anthos Service Mesh, you need to enable the same features when you upgrade. You enable optional features by adding --set values flags or by specifying the -f flag with a YAML file when you run the istioctl apply command.

    If you are upgrading from Anthos Service Mesh 1.4.5+ and you enabled optional features in a YAML file, you need to convert the YAML from the IstioControlPlane API to the IstioOperator API.

  3. Schedule a downtime. Upgrading can take up to 1 hour, depending on the scale of the cluster. Note that this doesn't include the time that you need to redeploy workloads to update sidecar proxies.

Setting up your environment

On your local machine, install and initialize the Google Cloud CLI.

If you already have the gcloud CLI installed:

  1. Authenticate with the gcloud CLI:

    gcloud auth login
    
  2. Update the components:

    gcloud components update
    
  3. Install kubectl:

    gcloud components install kubectl
    
  4. Get the project ID of the project that the cluster was created in:

    gcloud

    gcloud projects list

    Console

    1. In the Google Cloud console, go to the Dashboard page:

      Go to the Dashboard page

    2. Click the Select from drop-down list at the top of the page. In the Select from window that appears, select your project. The project ID is displayed on the project Dashboard Project info card.

  5. Set the default project ID for the Google Cloud CLI:

    gcloud config set project PROJECT_ID

Setting credentials and permissions

  1. Ensure that you have kubectl for the GKE on VMware user cluster where you want to install Anthos Service Mesh. Note that you can install Anthos Service Mesh only on a user cluster, not an admin cluster.
  2. Grant cluster admin permissions to the current user. You need these permissions to create the necessary role based access control (RBAC) rules for Anthos Service Mesh:
    kubectl create clusterrolebinding cluster-admin-binding \
      --clusterrole=cluster-admin \
      --user="$(gcloud config get-value core/account)"

    If you see the "cluster-admin-binding" already exists error, you can safely ignore it and continue with the existing cluster-admin-binding.

Downloading the installation file

    Linux

  1. Download the Anthos Service Mesh installation file to your current working directory:
    curl -LO https://storage.googleapis.com/gke-release/asm/istio-1.5.10-asm.2-linux.tar.gz
  2. Download the signature file and use openssl to verify the signature:
    curl -LO https://storage.googleapis.com/gke-release/asm/istio-1.5.10-asm.2-linux.tar.gz.1.sig
    openssl dgst -verify - -signature istio-1.5.10-asm.2-linux.tar.gz.1.sig istio-1.5.10-asm.2-linux.tar.gz <<'EOF'
    -----BEGIN PUBLIC KEY-----
    MFkwEwYHKoZIzj0CAQYIKoZIzj0DAQcDQgAEWZrGCUaJJr1H8a36sG4UUoXvlXvZ
    wQfk16sxprI2gOJ2vFFggdq3ixF2h4qNBt0kI7ciDhgpwS8t+/960IsIgw==
    -----END PUBLIC KEY-----
    EOF

    The expected output is: Verified OK

  3. Extract the contents of the file to any location on your file system. For example, to extract the contents to the current working directory:
    tar xzf istio-1.5.10-asm.2-linux.tar.gz

    The command creates an installation directory in your current working directory named istio-1.5.10-asm.2 that contains:

    • Sample applications in samples
    • The following tools in the bin directory:
      • istioctl: You use istioctl to install Anthos Service Mesh.
      • asmctl: You use asmctl to help validate your security configuration after installing Anthos Service Mesh. (Currently, asmctl isn't supported on GKE on VMware.)

  4. Mac OS

  5. Download the Anthos Service Mesh installation file to your current working directory:
    curl -LO https://storage.googleapis.com/gke-release/asm/istio-1.5.10-asm.2-osx.tar.gz
  6. Download the signature file and use openssl to verify the signature:
    curl -LO https://storage.googleapis.com/gke-release/asm/istio-1.5.10-asm.2-osx.tar.gz.1.sig
    openssl dgst -sha256 -verify /dev/stdin -signature istio-1.5.10-asm.2-osx.tar.gz.1.sig istio-1.5.10-asm.2-osx.tar.gz <<'EOF'
    -----BEGIN PUBLIC KEY-----
    MFkwEwYHKoZIzj0CAQYIKoZIzj0DAQcDQgAEWZrGCUaJJr1H8a36sG4UUoXvlXvZ
    wQfk16sxprI2gOJ2vFFggdq3ixF2h4qNBt0kI7ciDhgpwS8t+/960IsIgw==
    -----END PUBLIC KEY-----
    EOF

    The expected output is: Verified OK

  7. Extract the contents of the file to any location on your file system. For example, to extract the contents to the current working directory:
    tar xzf istio-1.5.10-asm.2-osx.tar.gz

    The command creates an installation directory in your current working directory named istio-1.5.10-asm.2 that contains:

    • Sample applications in samples
    • The following tools in the bin directory:
      • istioctl: You use istioctl to install Anthos Service Mesh.
      • asmctl: You use asmctl to help validate your security configuration after installing Anthos Service Mesh. (Currently, asmctl isn't supported on GKE on VMware.)

  8. Windows

  9. Download the Anthos Service Mesh installation file to your current working directory:
    curl -LO https://storage.googleapis.com/gke-release/asm/istio-1.5.10-asm.2-win.zip
  10. Download the signature file and use openssl to verify the signature:
    curl -LO https://storage.googleapis.com/gke-release/asm/istio-1.5.10-asm.2-win.zip.1.sig
    openssl dgst -verify - -signature istio-1.5.10-asm.2-win.zip.1.sig istio-1.5.10-asm.2-win.zip <<'EOF'
    -----BEGIN PUBLIC KEY-----
    MFkwEwYHKoZIzj0CAQYIKoZIzj0DAQcDQgAEWZrGCUaJJr1H8a36sG4UUoXvlXvZ
    wQfk16sxprI2gOJ2vFFggdq3ixF2h4qNBt0kI7ciDhgpwS8t+/960IsIgw==
    -----END PUBLIC KEY-----
    EOF

    The expected output is: Verified OK

  11. Extract the contents of the file to any location on your file system. For example, to extract the contents to the current working directory:
    tar xzf istio-1.5.10-asm.2-win.zip

    The command creates an installation directory in your current working directory named istio-1.5.10-asm.2 that contains:

    • Sample applications in samples
    • The following tools in the bin directory:
      • istioctl: You use istioctl to install Anthos Service Mesh.
      • asmctl: You use asmctl to help validate your security configuration after installing Anthos Service Mesh. (Currently, asmctl isn't supported on GKE on VMware.)

  12. Ensure that you're in the Anthos Service Mesh installation's root directory.
    cd istio-1.5.10-asm.2
  13. For convenience, add the tools in the /bin directory to your PATH:
    export PATH=$PWD/bin:$PATH

Upgrading Anthos Service Mesh

This section explains how to upgrade Anthos Service Mesh and enable the Supported default features listed on the Supported features page. For information on enabling the Supported optional features, see Enabling optional features.

To install Anthos Service Mesh:

Choose one of the following commands to configure Anthos Service Mesh in PERMISSIVE mutual TLS (mTLS) authentication mode or STRICT mTLS mode.

PERMISSIVE mTLS

istioctl manifest apply --set profile=asm-onprem

STRICT mTLS

istioctl manifest apply --set profile=asm-onprem \
  --set values.global.mtls.enabled=true

Check the control plane components

Upgrading requires reinstalling the control plane components, which takes about 5 to 10 minutes to complete. The old control plane components are terminated and then deleted as the new components are installed. You can check the progress by looking at the value in the AGE column of the workloads.

kubectl get pod -n istio-system

Example output:

NAME                                     READY   STATUS        RESTARTS   AGE
istio-ingressgateway-5bfdf7c586-v6wxx    2/2     Terminating   0          25m
istio-ingressgateway-7b598c5557-b88md    2/2     Running       0          5m44s
istiod-78cdbbbdb-d7tps                   1/1     Running       0          5m16s
promsd-576b8db4d6-lqf64                  2/2     Running       1          5m26s

In this example, there are two instances of istio-ingressgateway. The instance with 25min the AGE column is being terminated. All the other components are newly installed.

Updating sidecar proxies

Anthos Service Mesh uses sidecar proxies to enhance network security, reliability, and observability. With Anthos Service Mesh, these functions are abstracted away from the application's primary container and implemented in a common out-of-process proxy delivered as a separate container in the same Pod.

Any workloads that were running on your cluster before you installed Anthos Service Mesh need to have the sidecar proxy injected or updated so they have the current Anthos Service Mesh version. Before you deploy new workloads, make sure to configure sidecar proxy injection so that Anthos Service Mesh can monitor and secure traffic.

You can enable automatic sidecar injection with one command, for example:

kubectl label namespace NAMESPACE istio-injection=enabled --overwrite

where NAMESPACE is the name of the namespace for your application's services or default if you didn't explicitly create a namespace.

For more information, see Injecting sidecar proxies.