This guide explains how to do a clean installation of Anthos Service Mesh version 1.5.10 on an existing Google Cloud GKE cluster. If you have previous version of Anthos Service Mesh installed, refer to Upgrading Anthos Service Mesh on GKE.
The installation enables the following features:
- Mesh telemetry.
- Mesh security, including Anthos Service Mesh certificate authority (Mesh CA).
- The Supported default features listed on the Supported features page.
This guide also explains how to register your cluster in the fleet that is in the same Google Cloud project as the cluster. A fleet lets you organize clusters to make multi-cluster management easier. By registering your clusters in a fleet, you can group services and other infrastructure as needed to apply consistent policies.
Before you start the installation:
- Set up your environment. Note that
the installation requires
kpt
. - Review the following requirements and restrictions.
Requirements
You must have an GKE Enterprise trial license or subscription. See the GKE Enterprise Pricing guide for details.
Your GKE cluster must meet the following requirements:
At least four nodes. If you need to add nodes, see Resizing a cluster.
The minimum machine type is
e2-standard-4
, which has four vCPUs. If the machine type for your cluster doesn't have at least four vCPUs, change the machine type as described in Migrating workloads to different machine types.The cluster must be enrolled in a release channel. Anthos Service Mesh does not support static versions. Follow the instructions in Enrolling an existing cluster in a release channel if you have a static GKE version.
To be included in the service mesh, service ports must be named, and the name must include the port's protocol in the following syntax:
name: protocol[-suffix]
where the square brackets indicate an optional suffix that must start with a dash. For more information, see Naming service ports.If you are installing Anthos Service Mesh on a private cluster, you must add a firewall rule to open port 15017 if you want to use automatic sidecar injection. If you don't add the firewall rule and automatic sidecar injection is enabled, you get an error when you deploy workloads. For details on adding a firewall rule, see Adding firewall rules for specific use cases.
If you have created a service perimeter in your organization, you might need to add the Mesh CA service to the perimeter. See Adding Mesh CA to a service perimeter for more information.
Restrictions
Only one installation of Anthos Service Mesh per Google Cloud project is supported. Multiple mesh deployments in a single project aren't supported.
Certificate data
Certificates from Mesh CA include the following data about your application's services:
- The Google Cloud project ID
- The GKE namespace
- The GKE service account name
Setting up your project
-
Get the project ID of the project that the cluster was created in:
gcloud
gcloud projects list
Console
- In the Google Cloud console, go to the Dashboard page:
-
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.
- Create an environment variable for the project ID:
export PROJECT_ID=YOUR_PROJECT_ID
-
Set the default project ID for the
gcloud
command-line tool:gcloud config set project ${PROJECT_ID}
- Create an environment variable for the project number:
export PROJECT_NUMBER=$(gcloud projects describe ${PROJECT_ID} --format="value(projectNumber)")
-
Set the required Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles. If you are a
Project Owner, you have all the necessary permissions to complete
the installation and register your cluster with your environ.
If you aren't a Project Owner, you need someone who is to grant you the
following specific IAM roles. In the following command, change
GCP_EMAIL_ADDRESS
to the account that you use to log in to Google Cloud.gcloud projects add-iam-policy-binding ${PROJECT_ID} \ --member user:GCP_EMAIL_ADDRESS \ --role=roles/editor \ --role=roles/compute.admin \ --role=roles/container.admin \ --role=roles/resourcemanager.projectIamAdmin \ --role=roles/iam.serviceAccountAdmin \ --role=roles/iam.serviceAccountKeyAdmin \ --role=roles/gkehub.admin
To learn more about how to grant IAM roles, refer to Granting, changing, and revoking access to resources. For a description of these roles, see Permissions required to install Anthos Service Mesh
- Enable the following APIs:
gcloud services enable \ container.googleapis.com \ compute.googleapis.com \ monitoring.googleapis.com \ logging.googleapis.com \ cloudtrace.googleapis.com \ meshca.googleapis.com \ meshtelemetry.googleapis.com \ meshconfig.googleapis.com \ iamcredentials.googleapis.com \ anthos.googleapis.com \ gkeconnect.googleapis.com \ gkehub.googleapis.com \ cloudresourcemanager.googleapis.com
Enabling the APIs can take a minute or more to complete. When the APIs are enabled, you see output similar to the following:
Operation "operations/acf.601db672-88e6-4f98-8ceb-aa3b5725533c" finished successfully.
Setting up an existing GKE cluster
This section explains how to set up an existing GKE cluster with the options that are required for Anthos Service Mesh. For more information, see the GKE documentation.
Create the following environment variables:
Set the cluster name.
export CLUSTER_NAME=YOUR_CLUSTER_NAME
Set the
CLUSTER_LOCATION
to either your cluster zone or cluster region.export CLUSTER_LOCATION=YOUR_ZONE_OR_REGION
Set the workload pool.
export WORKLOAD_POOL=${PROJECT_ID}.svc.id.goog
Set the mesh ID.
export MESH_ID="proj-${PROJECT_NUMBER}"
Set the default zone or region for the Google Cloud CLI.
If you have a single-zone cluster, set the default zone:
gcloud config set compute/zone ${CLUSTER_LOCATION}
If you have a regional cluster, set the default region:
gcloud config set compute/region ${CLUSTER_LOCATION}
Tip: To make setting up your shell environment easier in the future, you can copy and paste the
export
statements for each environment variable to a simple shell script that yousource
when you start a new shell. You can also add thegcloud
commands that set default values to the script. Or you can usegcloud init
to create and activate a namedgcloud
configuration.Set the
mesh_id
label on the cluster, which is required for metrics to get displayed on the Anthos Service Mesh dashboard in the Google Cloud console. If your cluster has existing labels that you want to keep, you must include those labels when adding themesh_id
label.To see if your cluster has existing labels:
gcloud container clusters describe ${CLUSTER_NAME}
Look for the
resourceLabels
field in the output. Each label is stored on a separate line under theresourceLabels
field, for example:resourceLabels: csm: '' env: dev release: stable
If the
csm
label is in the output, you don't need to preserve it. Themesh_id
label replaces thecsm
label.For convenience, you can add the labels to an environment variable. In the following, replace
YOUR_EXISTING_LABELS
with a comma-separated list of the existing labels on your cluster in the formatKEY=VALUE
, for example:env=dev,release=stable
export EXISTING_LABELS="YOUR_EXISTING_LABELS"
Set the
mesh_id
label:If your cluster has existing labels that you want to keep, update the cluster with the
mesh_id
and the existing labels:gcloud container clusters update ${CLUSTER_NAME} \ --update-labels=mesh_id=${MESH_ID},${EXISTING_LABELS}
If you cluster doesn't have any existing labels, update the cluster with only the
mesh_id
label:gcloud container clusters update ${CLUSTER_NAME} \ --update-labels=mesh_id=${MESH_ID}
Enable Workload Identity:
gcloud container clusters update ${CLUSTER_NAME} \ --workload-pool=${WORKLOAD_POOL}
Enable Cloud Monitoring and Cloud Logging on GKE:
gcloud container clusters update ${CLUSTER_NAME} \ --enable-stackdriver-kubernetes
If your cluster is using a static version of GKE, enroll the cluster in a release channel.
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.
- Initialize your project to ready it for installation. Among other things,
this command creates a service account to let Istio components, such as the
sidecar proxy, securely access your project's data and resources:
curl --request POST \ --header "Authorization: Bearer $(gcloud auth print-access-token)" \ --data '' \ https://meshconfig.googleapis.com/v1alpha1/projects/${PROJECT_ID}:initialize
The command responds with empty curly braces:
{}
If you install a new version of Anthos Service Mesh on this cluster in the future, you don't need to re-run the command, but running the command again doesn't affect your installation.
-
Get
authentication credentials to interact with the cluster:
gcloud container clusters get-credentials ${CLUSTER_NAME}
-
Grant cluster admin permissions to the current user. You need these
permissions to create the necessary
role based access
control (RBAC) rules for Anthos Service Mesh:
kubectl create clusterrolebinding cluster-admin-binding \ --clusterrole=cluster-admin \ --user="$(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.
Registering your cluster
You must register your cluster with the project's fleet to gain access to the unified user interface in the Google Cloud console. A fleet provides a unified way to view and manage the clusters and their workloads, including clusters outside Google Cloud.
Create a Google Cloud service account and key file
A JSON file containing service account credentials is required to register a cluster. To follow the principle of least privilege, we recommend that you create a distinct service account for each cluster that you register.
To create a service account and key file:
Select a name for the service account and create an environment variable for it:
export SERVICE_ACCOUNT_NAME=SERVICE_ACCOUNT_NAME
Create the service account:
gcloud iam service-accounts create ${SERVICE_ACCOUNT_NAME}
List all of a project's service accounts to confirm the service account was created:
gcloud iam service-accounts list
Bind the gkehub.connect IAM role to the service account:
gcloud projects add-iam-policy-binding ${PROJECT_ID} \ --member="serviceAccount:${SERVICE_ACCOUNT_NAME}@${PROJECT_ID}.iam.gserviceaccount.com" \ --role="roles/gkehub.connect"
Create an environment variable for the local filepath where you want to save the JSON file. We recommend that you name the file using the service account name and your project ID, such as:
/tmp/creds/${SERVICE_ACCOUNT_NAME}-${PROJECT_ID}.json
export SERVICE_ACCOUNT_KEY_PATH=LOCAL_KEY_PATH
Download the service account's private key JSON file:
gcloud iam service-accounts keys create ${SERVICE_ACCOUNT_KEY_PATH} \ --iam-account=${SERVICE_ACCOUNT_NAME}@${PROJECT_ID}.iam.gserviceaccount.com
Register the cluster
In the following command, replace MEMBERSHIP_NAME
with a name that uniquely represents the cluster being registered on the Hub.
gcloud container hub memberships register MEMBERSHIP_NAME \ --gke-cluster=${CLUSTER_LOCATION}/${CLUSTER_NAME} \ --service-account-key-file=${SERVICE_ACCOUNT_KEY_PATH}
The command responds with output similar to the following:
kubeconfig entry generated for CLUSTER_NAME. Waiting for membership to be created...done. Created a new membership [projects/PROJECT_ID/locations/global/memberships/MEMBERSHIP_NAME] for the cluster [MEMBERSHIP_NAME] Generating the Connect Agent manifest... Deploying the Connect Agent on cluster [MEMBERSHIP_NAME] in namespace [gke-connect]... Deployed the Connect Agent on cluster [MEMBERSHIP_NAME] in namespace [gke-connect]. Finished registering the cluster [MEMBERSHIP_NAME] with the Hub.
This service account key is stored as a secret named creds-gcp
in the
gke-connect
namespace.
For more information about cluster registration, see Registering a cluster in the Connect documentation.
Downloading the installation file
Before continuing, verify that the ASM Mesh Data Plane Service Account is a member of the project:
gcloud projects get-iam-policy ${PROJECT_ID} | grep -B 1 'roles/meshdataplane.serviceAgent'
If the previous command doesn't output anything, go back to the
Set credentials and permissions
section and run the curl
command.
-
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
-
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
-
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 useistioctl
to install Anthos Service Mesh.asmctl
: You useasmctl
to help validate your security configuration after installing Anthos Service Mesh. (Currently,asmctl
isn't supported on GKE on VMware.)
- Sample applications in
-
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
-
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
-
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 useistioctl
to install Anthos Service Mesh.asmctl
: You useasmctl
to help validate your security configuration after installing Anthos Service Mesh. (Currently,asmctl
isn't supported on GKE on VMware.)
- Sample applications in
-
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
-
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
-
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 useistioctl
to install Anthos Service Mesh.asmctl
: You useasmctl
to help validate your security configuration after installing Anthos Service Mesh. (Currently,asmctl
isn't supported on GKE on VMware.)
- Sample applications in
-
Ensure that you're in the Anthos Service Mesh installation's root directory.
cd istio-1.5.10-asm.2
-
For convenience, add the tools in the
/bin
directory to your PATH:export PATH=$PWD/bin:$PATH
Linux
Mac OS
Windows
Preparing resource configuration files
When you run the istioctl apply command
to install Anthos Service Mesh, you
specify -f istio-operator.yaml
on the command line. This file contains
information about your project and cluster that is needed to enable the Mesh
telemetry and Mesh security features. You need to download the
istio-operator.yaml
and other resource configuration files and set the
project and cluster information.
To prepare the resource configuration files:
If you haven't already, install
kpt
:gcloud components install kpt
Optionally, create a new directory for the Anthos Service Mesh package resource configuration files. If you plan to set up more than one cluster, you might want to use the cluster name as the directory name.
Change to the directory where you want to download the Anthos Service Mesh package.
Download the Anthos Service Mesh package to the current working directory:
kpt pkg get \ https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/anthos-service-mesh-packages.git/asm@release-1.5-asm .
Set the cluster name:
kpt cfg set asm gcloud.container.cluster ${CLUSTER_NAME}
Optionally, customize the resource configuration files by using the
kpt
setters. By default, these setters use the defaults forgcloud config
. If you set thegcloud config
defaults, or if you want to change the values, run the following setters:Set the project ID:
kpt cfg set asm gcloud.core.project ${PROJECT_ID}
Set the default zone or region:
kpt cfg set asm gcloud.compute.location ${CLUSTER_LOCATION}
Optionally, you can check in the resource configuration files to your own source control system, such as Cloud Source Repositories, so that you can track changes to the files.
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.
- Anthos Service Mesh certificate authority (Mesh CA).
- The telemetry data pipeline that powers the Anthos Service Mesh dashboards in the Google Cloud console.
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 \ -f asm/cluster/istio-operator.yaml
STRICT mTLS
istioctl manifest apply --set profile=asm \ -f asm/cluster/istio-operator.yaml \ --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
Expected output is similar to the following:
NAME READY STATUS RESTARTS AGE istio-ingressgateway-74cc894bfd-786rg 1/1 Running 0 7m19s istiod-78cdbbbdb-d7tps 1/1 Running 0 7m36s promsd-576b8db4d6-lqf64 2/2 Running 1 7m19s
Validating the installation
We recommend that you use the asmctl
analysis tool to validate the basic
configuration of your project, cluster, and workloads. If an asmctl
test
fails, asmctl
recommends solutions, if possible. The asmctl validate
command runs basic tests that check:
- That the APIs required by Anthos Service Mesh are enabled on the project.
- That the Istio-Ingressgateway is properly configured to call Mesh CA.
- The general health of Istiod and Istio-Ingressgateway.
If you run the asmctl validate
command with the optional
--with-testing-workloads
flag, in addition to the basic tests, asmctl
runs security tests that check:
- Mutual TLS (mTLS) communication is configured properly.
- Mesh CA can issue certificates.
To run the security tests, asmctl
deploys workloads on your cluster in a
test namespace, runs the mTLS communication tests, outputs the results, and
deletes the test namespace.
To run asmctl
:
Ensure that gcloud application-default credentials are set:
gcloud auth application-default login
If you haven't already, get authentication credentials to interact with the cluster:
gcloud container clusters get-credentials ${CLUSTER_NAME}
To run both the basic and security tests (assuming
istio-1.5.10-asm.2/bin
) is in yourPATH
):asmctl validate --with-testing-workloads
On success, the command responds with output similar to the following:
[asmctl version 0.3.0] Using Kubernetes context: example-project_us-central1-example-cluster To change the context, use the --context flag Validating enabled APIs OK Validating ingressgateway configuration OK Validating istio system OK Validating sample traffic Launching example services... Sent traffic to example service http code: 200 verified mTLS configuration OK Validating issued certs OK
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.
Viewing the Anthos Service Mesh dashboards
After you have workloads deployed on your cluster with the sidecar proxies injected, you can explore the Anthos Service Mesh pages in the Google Cloud console to see all of the observability features that Anthos Service Mesh offers. Note that it takes about one or two minutes for telemetry data to be displayed in the Google Cloud console after you deploy workloads.
Access to Anthos Service Mesh in the Google Cloud console is controlled by Identity and Access Management (IAM). To access the Anthos Service Mesh pages, a Project Owner must grant users the Project Editor or Viewer role, or the more restrictive roles described in Controlling access to Anthos Service Mesh in the Google Cloud console.
In the Google Cloud console, go to Anthos Service Mesh.
Select the Google Cloud project from the drop-down list on the menu bar.
If you have more than one service mesh, select the mesh from the Service Mesh drop-down list.
To learn more, see Exploring Anthos Service Mesh in the Google Cloud console.
In addition to the Anthos Service Mesh pages, metrics related to your services (such as the number of requests received by a particular service) are sent to Cloud Monitoring, where they appear in the Metrics Explorer.
To view metrics:
In the Google Cloud console, go to the Monitoring page:
Select Resources > Metrics Explorer.
For a full list of metrics, see Istio metrics in the Cloud Monitoring documentation.