Upgrading Anthos Service Mesh on premises

This guide explains how to upgrade Anthos Service Mesh from version 1.4.5+ to version 1.4.10 on GKE on VMware. If you want to upgrade to Anthos Service Mesh 1.5, see the 1.5 version of Upgrading Anthos Service Mesh on premises.

Caution: Upgrading is a disruptive action on your cluster, and you must plan accordingly.

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 upgrade guide to become familiar with the features and the upgrade process.

2. Review your authorization policies to see if they need to be updated.

3. If you enabled optional features when you installed the previous version of Anthos Service Mesh by adding --set values flags to the istioctl apply command line, you need to use the same flags when you run istioctl apply to install 1.4.10.

4. If you enabled optional features when you installed the previous version of Anthos Service Mesh by adding the -f flag to the istioctl apply command line to specify a YAML file, you must specify the same file (or a file with the same content) when you run istioctl apply to upgrade to 1.4.10.

   Caution: Omitting --set values flags or the -f flag with the YAML file results in a successful installation. However, it has a different configuration than you intended because the omitted values are reset back to their defaults when Anthos Service Mesh is redeployed.

5. 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.

Note: Updating and removing components using gcloud components is disabled if you install the gcloud CLI using apt-get or yum. To manage the gcloud CLI in this case, continue using the package management tool that you used during installation to update or remove components.

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 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

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

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

Mac OS

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

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

Windows

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

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

1. 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.)

2. Ensure that you're in the Anthos Service Mesh installation's root directory.

   cd istio-1.4.10-asm.18

3. 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 upgrade 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

Caution: In PERMISSIVE mode, your services can accept both plaintext traffic and mutual TLS traffic at the same time and send plaintext intra-mesh traffic by default. To secure your service mesh after the upgrade, migrate your services to mutual TLS STRICT mode, as described in Mutual TLS Migration.

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-citadel-64f6d7c7c7-jtmw7            1/1     Running      0          38s
istio-galley-6b4878d445-c4rtt             1/2     Running      0          37s
istio-ingressgateway-7866c5c88f-llp28     0/1     Running      0          37s
istio-ingressgateway-7866c5c88f-m9sck     1/1     Terminating  0          25m
istio-pilot-7f4fdcb89c-r98jl              1/2     Running      0          37s
istio-sidecar-injector-65cbd565b9-q4wm9   1/1     Running      0          37s
promsd-78dfdf7c7d-2bhr6                   2/2     Running      1          37s

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.