Prepare an offline installation of Cloud Service Mesh

This page explains how to prepare offline installations of Cloud Service Mesh on supported platforms other than GKE on Google Cloud.

Note: This guide only supports Cloud Service Mesh with Istio APIs and does not support Google Cloud APIs. For more information see, Cloud Service Mesh overview.

When running the asmcli tool to install Cloud Service Mesh, it uses a local directory to store configuration and artifacts. By default, a temporary directory is created when executing the tool. However, you can specify a directory using the --output_dir option on the command line. If the directory already exists with the necessary configuration and artifacts, they will be reused instead of re-downloading anything.

To perform an offline installation of Cloud Service Mesh, you can generate a configuration package on a machine with Internet access, and then distribute that package to other machines without internet access. Then, use the subcommand asmcli build-offline-package to generate configuration packages.

Before you begin

Before you begin, make sure that you:

• Review the prerequisites.
• Review the information in Plan the install.
• Install the required tools.
• Download asmcli.
• During installation, ensure access to Google APIs and Services is possible, or manually enable the required dependencies. Even in offline mode, asmcli uses Google Cloud CLI to enable some dependencies if the corresponding flag is passed during installation.

Offline installation of Cloud Service Mesh

The following outlines how to prepare an offline installation of Cloud Service Mesh:

1. On the machine with Internet access that you installed Cloud Service Mesh, create a package and then save it to the folder OFFLINE_PKG_DIR_PATH:

   ./asmcli build-offline-package \
   --output_dir OFFLINE_PKG_DIR_PATH
   

   Note: The offline-package includes critical hidden files. You must copy all of the files to the offline machine. To avoid missing files, create an archive bundle of the entire output_dir and copy it to the offline machine.

2. Copy the configuration directory and asmcli tool to the offline machine.

3. Follow the normal instructions for installing Cloud Service Mesh. Wherever the instructions specify to run asmcli install, ensure that you also pass the --offline flag and specify the configuration directory created in the previous steps:

     ./asmcli install \
     --output_dir OFFLINE_PKG_DIR_PATH \
     --project_id PROJECT_ID \
     --cluster_location CLUSTER_LOCATION \
     --cluster_name CLUSTER_NAME \
     --offline
   

What's next?

• Learn about setting up a multi-cluster mesh outside of Google Cloud.

• Configure an external IP address on-premises.

• Deploy the Online Boutique sample application.