Injecting sidecar proxies

Anthos Service Mesh uses sidecar proxies to enhance network security, reliability, and observability. These functions are abstracted away from the application's primary container and implemented in a common out-of-process proxy (the sidecar), delivered as a separate container in the same Pod. This provides the Anthos Service Mesh's features without redesigning your production applications to participate in a service mesh.

Automatic sidecar proxy injection occurs when Anthos Service Mesh detects a namespace label you configure for the workload's Pod. The proxy intercepts all inbound and outbound traffic to the workloads and communicates with Anthos Service Mesh.

Permissions required for these tasks

To perform the tasks on this page, you must have the roles/container.clusterAdmin or a higher role. See Google Kubernetes Engine roles for details on the permissions included in this role.

Enabling automatic sidecar injection

The recommended way to inject sidecar proxies is to use the webhooks-based automatic sidecar injector, although you can manually update your Pods' Kubernetes configuration. By default, sidecar auto-injection is disabled for all namespaces.

To enable automatic sidecar injection:

1. Use the following command to locate the label on istiod, which contains the revision label value to use in later steps.

   kubectl -n istio-system get pods -l app=istiod --show-labels

   The output looks similar to the following:

   NAME                                READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE   LABELS
   istiod-asm-173-3-5788d57586-bljj4   1/1     Running   0          23h   app=istiod,istio.io/rev=asm-173-3,istio=istiod,pod-template-hash=5788d57586
   istiod-asm-173-3-5788d57586-vsklm   1/1     Running   1          23h   app=istiod,istio.io/rev=asm-173-3,istio=istiod,pod-template-hash=5788d57586
   

   In the output, under the LABELS column, note the value of the istiod revision label, which follows the prefix istio.io/rev=. In this example, the value is asm-173-3.

2. Apply the revision label to namespaces. In the following command, NAMESPACE is the name of the namespace where you want sidecar injection to occur, and REVISION is the istiod revision label you noted in the previous step.

   kubectl label namespace NAMESPACE istio-injection- istio.io/rev=REVISION --overwrite
   

3. Restart the affected pods, using the steps in the next section.

Restart Pods to update sidecar proxies

Warning: Unless you have a load balancer or router setup for blue-green deployments, make sure you test restarting Pods in a staging environment to verify that your services can handle any potential traffic interruption.

With automatic sidecar injection, you can update the sidecars for existing Pods with a Pod restart:

How you restart Pods depends on if they were created as part of a Deployment.

1. If you used a Deployment, restart the Deployment, which restarts all Pods with sidecars:

   kubectl rollout restart deployment -n YOUR_NAMESPACE

   If you didn't use a Deployment, delete the Pods, and they are automatically recreated with sidecars:

   kubectl delete pod -n YOUR_NAMESPACE --all

2. Check that all the Pods in the namespace have sidecars injected:

   kubectl get pod -n YOUR_NAMESPACE

   In the following example output from the previous command, notice that the READY column indicates there are two containers for each of your workloads: the primary container and the container for the sidecar proxy.

   NAME                    READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
   YOUR_WORKLOAD           2/2     Running   0          20s
   ...
   

What's next

Learn more about:

• Deploying workloads
• Manual sidecar injection