Installing Anthos Service Mesh on premises

Anthos Service Mesh, is an Istio-compatible framework for connecting, monitoring, and securing services running on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and GKE on VMware. It lets you create a network of deployed services with load balancing, service-to-service authentication, monitoring, and more, without requiring any changes in service code. Anthos Service Mesh automatically injects a sidecar proxy for each of your applications' pods. The sidecar proxy intercepts all network traffic to and from the pods. Anthos Service Mesh also configures an ingress gateway to manage inbound traffic to the mesh. You can use open source Istio APIs to configure policies that are enforced on sidecars and gateways.

This guide explains how to do a clean installation of Anthos Service Mesh version 1.4.10-asm.18 on GKE on VMware. If you have a previous version of Anthos Service Mesh installed, refer to Upgrading Anthos Service Mesh on GKE on VMware.

The installation enables the supported core Istio features on GKE on VMware. Note that the Anthos Service Mesh managed components aren't currently supported on GKE on VMware.

About the control plane components

GKE on VMware comes with the following Istio components preinstalled:

  • Citadel is installed in the kube-system namespace.
  • Pilot and the Istio Ingress Gateway are installed in the gke-system namespace.

GKE on VMware uses these components to enable ingress and to secure communication between Google-controlled components. If you only need ingress functionality, you don't need to install OSS Istio or Anthos Service Mesh. For more information on configuring ingress, see Enabling ingress.

When you install Anthos Service Mesh, its components are installed in the istio-system namespace. Because the Anthos Service Mesh components are in a different namespace, they don't conflict with the GKE on VMware preinstalled Istio components.

Before you begin

Review the following requirements and restrictions before beginning the setup.

Requirements

  • You must have an GKE Enterprise trial license or subscription. See the GKE Enterprise Pricing guide for details.

  • Make sure the user cluster that you install Anthos Service Mesh on has at least 4 vCPUs, 15 GB memory, and 4 replicas.

  • Review Requirements for Pods and Services before you deploy workloads.

  • Make sure your cluster version is listed in Supported environments. To check your cluster version:

    gkectl version

    Output like the following is displayed:

    1.2.0-gke.6 (git-0912663b0)

Restrictions

Only one installation of Anthos Service Mesh per Google Cloud project is supported. Multiple mesh deployments in a single project aren't supported.

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

Before continuing, make sure that you enabled all the required APIs. If you have any doubt, it doesn't hurt to run the gcloud services enable command again.

  1. Ensure that you have kubectl for the 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.

Preparing to install Anthos Service Mesh

    Linux

  1. Download the Anthos Service Mesh installation file to your current working directory: 
    curl -LO https://storage.googleapis.com/gke-release/asm/istio-1.4.10-asm.18-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-1.4.10-asm.18-linux.tar.gz.1.sig
openssl dgst -verify - -signature istio-1.4.10-asm.18-linux.tar.gz.1.sig istio-1.4.10-asm.18-linux.tar.gz <<'EOF'
-----BEGIN PUBLIC KEY-----
MFkwEwYHKoZIzj0CAQYIKoZIzj0DAQcDQgAEWZrGCUaJJr1H8a36sG4UUoXvlXvZ
wQfk16sxprI2gOJ2vFFggdq3ixF2h4qNBt0kI7ciDhgpwS8t+/960IsIgw==
-----END PUBLIC KEY-----
EOF

    The expected output is: Verified OK

    3. Mac OS

  3. Download the Anthos Service Mesh installation file to your current working directory: 
    curl -LO https://storage.googleapis.com/gke-release/asm/istio-1.4.10-asm.18-osx.tar.gz
  4. Download the signature file and use openssl to verify the signature: 
    curl -LO https://storage.googleapis.com/gke-release/asm/istio-1.4.10-asm.18-osx.tar.gz.1.sig
openssl dgst -sha256 -verify /dev/stdin -signature istio-1.4.10-asm.18-osx.tar.gz.1.sig istio-1.4.10-asm.18-osx.tar.gz <<'EOF'
-----BEGIN PUBLIC KEY-----
MFkwEwYHKoZIzj0CAQYIKoZIzj0DAQcDQgAEWZrGCUaJJr1H8a36sG4UUoXvlXvZ
wQfk16sxprI2gOJ2vFFggdq3ixF2h4qNBt0kI7ciDhgpwS8t+/960IsIgw==
-----END PUBLIC KEY-----
EOF

    The expected output is: Verified OK

    5. Windows

  5. Download the Anthos Service Mesh installation file to your current working directory: 
    curl -LO https://storage.googleapis.com/gke-release/asm/istio-1.4.10-asm.18-win.zip
  6. Download the signature file and use openssl to verify the signature: 
    curl -LO https://storage.googleapis.com/gke-release/asm/istio-1.4.10-asm.18-win.zip.1.sig
openssl dgst -verify - -signature istio-1.4.10-asm.18-win.zip.1.sig istio-1.4.10-asm.18-win.zip <<'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-1.4.10-asm.18-linux.tar.gz

    The command creates an installation directory in your current working directory named istio-1.4.10-asm.18 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. Ensure that you're in the Anthos Service Mesh installation's root directory. 
    cd istio-1.4.10-asm.18
  9. For convenience, add the tools in the /bin directory to your PATH: 
    export PATH=$PWD/bin:$PATH

Create the istio-system namespace

Create a namespace called istio-system for the control plane components: 

kubectl create namespace istio-system

Installing Anthos Service Mesh

This section explains how to install 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

Check that the control plane Pods in istio-system are up:

kubectl get pod -n istio-system

Expect to see output similar to the following:

NAME                                      READY   STATUS      RESTARTS   AGE
istio-citadel-85f4d775cd-dmpj2            1/1     Running     0          18m
istio-galley-5c65896ff7-m2pls             2/2     Running     0          18m
istio-ingressgateway-587cd459f-q6hqt      2/2     Running     0          18m
istio-pilot-9db77b99f-7wfb6               2/2     Running     0          18m
istio-sidecar-injector-69c4d9f875-dt8rn   1/1     Running     0          18m
promsd-55f464d964-lqs7w                   2/2     Running     0          18m

Injecting 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.

Configuring an external IP address

The default Anthos Service Mesh installation assumes that an external IP address is automatically allocated for LoadBalancer services. This is not true in GKE on VMware. Because of this, you need to allocate an IP address manually for the Anthos Service Mesh ingress Gateway resource.

To configure an external IP address, follow one of the sections below, depending on your cluster's load balancing mode:

Integrated load balancing mode

  1. Open the istio-ingressgateway Service's configuration:

    kubectl edit svc -n istio-system istio-ingressgateway

    The configuration for the istio-ingressgateway Service opens in your shell's default text editor.

  2. In the file, add the following line under the specification (spec) block:

    loadBalancerIP: <your static external IP address>

    For example:

    spec:
 loadBalancerIP: 203.0.113.1

  3. Save the file.

Manual load balancing mode

To expose a service of type NodePort with a VIP on your selected load balancer, you need to find out the nodePort values first:

  1. View the istio-ingressgateway Service's configuration in your shell:

    kubectl get svc -n istio-system istio-ingressgateway -o yaml

    Each of the ports for Anthos Service Mesh's gateways are displayed. The command output is similar to the following:

     ...
 ports:
 - name: status-port
   nodePort: 30391
   port: 15020
   protocol: TCP
   targetPort: 15020
 - name: http2
   nodePort: 31380
   port: 80
   protocol: TCP
   targetPort: 80
 - name: https
   nodePort: 31390
   port: 443
   protocol: TCP
   targetPort: 443
 - name: tcp
   nodePort: 31400
   port: 31400
   protocol: TCP
   targetPort: 31400
 - name: https-kiali
   nodePort: 31073
   port: 15029
   protocol: TCP
   targetPort: 15029
 - name: https-prometheus
   nodePort: 30253
   port: 15030
   protocol: TCP
   targetPort: 15030
 - name: https-grafana
   nodePort: 30050
   port: 15031
   protocol: TCP
   targetPort: 15031
 - name: https-tracing
   nodePort: 31204
   port: 15032
   protocol: TCP
   targetPort: 15032
 - name: tls
   nodePort: 30158
   port: 15443
   protocol: TCP
   targetPort: 15443
 ...

  2. Expose these ports through your load balancer.

    For example, the service port named http2 has port 80 and nodePort 31380. Suppose the node addresses for your user cluster are 192.168.0.10, 192.168.0.11, and 192.168.0.12, and your load balancer's VIP is 203.0.113.1.

    Configure your load balancer so that traffic sent to 203.0.113.1:80 is forwarded to 192.168.0.10:31380, 192.168.0.11:31380, or 192.168.0.12:31380. You can select the service ports that you want to expose on this given VIP.

What's next?