Anthos Service Mesh and Traffic Director are now Cloud Service Mesh. For more information, see the Cloud Service Mesh overview.

Set up an Envoy sidecar service mesh on GKE

This page describes how to set up an Envoy sidecar service mesh on GKE.

Prerequisites

As a starting point, this guide assumes that you have already:

Set up the Service

Create a sample HTTP service:

kubectl apply -f - <<EOF
kind: Namespace
apiVersion: v1
metadata:
  name: sidecar-example
---
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: whereami
  namespace: sidecar-example
spec:
  replicas: 2
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: whereami
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: whereami
    spec:
      containers:
      - name: whereami
        image: gcr.io/google-samples/whereami:v1.2.20
        ports:
        - containerPort: 8080
---
apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: whereami
  namespace: sidecar-example
spec:
  selector:
    app: whereami
  ports:
  - port: 8080
    targetPort: 8080
EOF

Create a baseline HTTPRoute for the service:

apiVersion: gateway.networking.k8s.io/v1beta1
kind: HTTPRoute
metadata:
  name: whereami-route
  namespace: sidecar-example
spec:
  parentRefs:
  - name: whereami
    kind: Service
    group: ""
  rules:
  - backendRefs:
    - name: whereami
      port: 8080
EOF

Alternatively, the following manifest describes a sample gRPC Service:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: sample-service
  namespace: sample-ns
  annotations:
    networking.gke.io/app-protocols: '{"50051": "HTTP2"}' # 50051 is backendref.port
spec:
  ports:
  - port: 50051
    targetPort: 50051

Set up the Client

Run the following command to enable sidecar injection in the sidecar-example namespace:
```
kubectl label namespace sidecar-example csm-injection=enabled
```

Create a client:

kubectl apply -f - <<EOF
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  labels:
    run: client
  name: client
  namespace: sidecar-example
spec:
  replicas: 1
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      run: client
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        run: client
    spec:
      containers:
      - name: client
        image: curlimages/curl
        command:
        - sh
        - -c
        - while true; do sleep 1; done
EOF

Verify that the client Pod has an Envoy sidecar container automatically injected:
```
kubectl get pods -n sidecar-example -l run=client
```
The output is similar to:
```
NAME                    READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
client-xxxx             2/2     Running   0          20s
```
Wait for the client to be ready and have the Status Running before continuing.

Verify Envoy-sidecar service mesh setup. The following command sends a request to the whereami service from the client

CLIENT_POD=$(kubectl get pod -n sidecar-example -l run=client -o=jsonpath='{.items[0].metadata.name}')

# The VIP where the following request will be sent. Because all requests
# from the client container are redirected to the Envoy proxy sidecar, you
# can use any IP address, including 10.0.0.2, 192.168.0.1, and others.
VIP='10.0.0.1'

TEST_CMD="curl -v -H 'host: whereami.sidecar-example.svc.cluster.local' $VIP"

kubectl exec -it $CLIENT_POD -n sidecar-example -c client -- /bin/sh -c "$TEST_CMD"

The output is similar to:

< Trying 10.0.0.1:80...
< Connected to 10.0.0.1 (10.0.0.1) port 80 (#0)
< GET / HTTP/1.1
< Host: whereami
< User-Agent: curl/7.82.0-DEV
< Accept: */*
<
< Mark bundle as not supporting multiuse
< HTTP/1.1 200 OK
< content-type: application/json
< content-length: 318
< access-control-allow-origin: *
< server: envoy
< date: Tue, 12 Apr 2022 22:30:13 GMT
<
{
  "cluster_name": "${CLUSTER_NAME}",
  "location": "${LOCATION}",
  "host_header": "whereami",
  ...
}