Installing on Anthos clusters on AWS

This guide explains how to install Anthos Service Mesh version 1.7.8-asm.10 on Anthos clusters on AWS.

With Anthos Service Mesh, the Istio Ingress Gateway comes preinstalled. But if you prefer to use an ingress controller, you can use Anthos Service Mesh to set up a Kubernetes Ingress resource. This guide shows you how to install Anthos Service Mesh and optionally set up a Kubernetes Ingress resource.

Before you begin

Before you begin the Anthos Service Mesh installation, make sure you have performed the following tasks:

Requirements

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

  • Review Naming service ports before you deploy workloads.

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

Restrictions

A Google Cloud project can only have one mesh associated with it.

Set up your environment

You need the following tools on the machine you want to install Anthos Service Mesh from. Note that you can install Anthos Service Mesh only on a user cluster, not an admin cluster.

  • The curl command-line tool.
  • The Cloud SDK (the gcloud command-line tool).

After installing the Cloud SDK:

  1. Authenticate with the Cloud SDK:

    gcloud auth login
    
  2. Update the components:

    gcloud components update
    
  3. Install kubectl:

    gcloud components install kubectl
    
  4. Install the required version of kpt:

       curl -L https://github.com/GoogleContainerTools/kpt/releases/download/v0.39.2/kpt_linux_amd64 > kpt_0_39_2
       chmod +x kpt_0_39_2
       alias kpt="$(readlink -f kpt_0_39_2)"
    
  5. Switch context to your user cluster:

    kubectl config use-context CLUSTER_NAME
  6. Grant cluster admin permissions to your user account (your Google Cloud login email address). 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=USER_ACCOUNT

Download the installation file

Linux

  1. Download the Anthos Service Mesh installation file to your current working directory:

    curl -LO https://storage.googleapis.com/gke-release/asm/istio-1.7.8-asm.10-linux-amd64.tar.gz
  2. Download the signature file and use openssl to verify the signature:

    curl -LO https://storage.googleapis.com/gke-release/asm/istio-1.7.8-asm.10-linux-amd64.tar.gz.1.sig
    openssl dgst -verify /dev/stdin -signature istio-1.7.8-asm.10-linux-amd64.tar.gz.1.sig istio-1.7.8-asm.10-linux-amd64.tar.gz <<'EOF'
    -----BEGIN PUBLIC KEY-----
    MFkwEwYHKoZIzj0CAQYIKoZIzj0DAQcDQgAEWZrGCUaJJr1H8a36sG4UUoXvlXvZ
    wQfk16sxprI2gOJ2vFFggdq3ixF2h4qNBt0kI7ciDhgpwS8t+/960IsIgw==
    -----END PUBLIC KEY-----
    EOF

    The expected output is: Verified OK.

  3. 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-1.7.8-asm.10-linux-amd64.tar.gz

    The command creates an installation directory in your current working directory named istio-1.7.8-asm.10 that contains:

    • Sample applications in the samples directory.
    • The istioctl command-line tool that you use to install Anthos Service Mesh is in the bin directory.
    • The Anthos Service Mesh configuration profiles are in the manifests/profiles directory.
  4. Ensure that you're in the Anthos Service Mesh installation's root directory.

    cd istio-1.7.8-asm.10

Mac OS

  1. Download the Anthos Service Mesh installation file to your current working directory:

    curl -LO https://storage.googleapis.com/gke-release/asm/istio-1.7.8-asm.10-osx.tar.gz
  2. Download the signature file and use openssl to verify the signature:

    curl -LO https://storage.googleapis.com/gke-release/asm/istio-1.7.8-asm.10-osx.tar.gz.1.sig
    openssl dgst -sha256 -verify /dev/stdin -signature istio-1.7.8-asm.10-osx.tar.gz.1.sig istio-1.7.8-asm.10-osx.tar.gz <<'EOF'
    -----BEGIN PUBLIC KEY-----
    MFkwEwYHKoZIzj0CAQYIKoZIzj0DAQcDQgAEWZrGCUaJJr1H8a36sG4UUoXvlXvZ
    wQfk16sxprI2gOJ2vFFggdq3ixF2h4qNBt0kI7ciDhgpwS8t+/960IsIgw==
    -----END PUBLIC KEY-----
    EOF

    The expected output is: Verified OK.

  3. 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-1.7.8-asm.10-osx.tar.gz

    The command creates an installation directory in your current working directory named istio-1.7.8-asm.10 that contains:

    • Sample applications in the samples directory.
    • The istioctl command-line tool that you use to install Anthos Service Mesh is in the bin directory.
    • The Anthos Service Mesh configuration profiles are in the manifests/profiles directory.
  4. Ensure that you're in the Anthos Service Mesh installation's root directory.

    cd istio-1.7.8-asm.10

Windows

  1. Download the Anthos Service Mesh installation file to your current working directory:

    curl -LO https://storage.googleapis.com/gke-release/asm/istio-1.7.8-asm.10-win.zip
  2. Download the signature file and use openssl to verify the signature:

    curl -LO https://storage.googleapis.com/gke-release/asm/istio-1.7.8-asm.10-win.zip.1.sig
    openssl dgst -verify - -signature istio-1.7.8-asm.10-win.zip.1.sig istio-1.7.8-asm.10-win.zip <<'EOF'
    -----BEGIN PUBLIC KEY-----
    MFkwEwYHKoZIzj0CAQYIKoZIzj0DAQcDQgAEWZrGCUaJJr1H8a36sG4UUoXvlXvZ
    wQfk16sxprI2gOJ2vFFggdq3ixF2h4qNBt0kI7ciDhgpwS8t+/960IsIgw==
    -----END PUBLIC KEY-----
    EOF

    The expected output is: Verified OK.

  3. 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-1.7.8-asm.10-win.zip

    The command creates an installation directory in your current working directory named istio-1.7.8-asm.10 that contains:

    • Sample applications in the samples directory.
    • The istioctl command-line tool that you use to install Anthos Service Mesh is in the bin directory.
    • The Anthos Service Mesh configuration profiles are in the manifests/profiles directory.
  4. Ensure that you're in the Anthos Service Mesh installation's root directory.

    cd istio-1.7.8-asm.10

Installing Anthos Service Mesh

This section explains how to install Anthos Service Mesh on your user cluster, which enables the Supported default features listed on the Supported features page for the asm-multicloud profile. You can choose to enable Ingress for the public subnet or the private subnet.

Public

  1. If needed, change to the istio-1.7.8-asm.10 directory. The istioctl client is version dependent. Make sure that you use the version in the istio-1.7.8-asm.10/bin directory.

  2. Run the following command to install Anthos Service Mesh. If you want to enable a supported optional feature, include -f and the YAML filename on the following command line. See Enabling optional features for more information.

  3. Install Anthos Service Mesh:

    bin/istioctl install \
      -f manifests/profiles/asm-multicloud.yaml \
      --set revision=asm-178-10
    

    The --set revision argument adds a revision label in the format istio.io/rev=asm-178-10 to istiod. The revision label is used by the automatic sidecar injector webhook to associate injected sidecars with a particular istiod revision. To enable sidecar auto-injection for a namespace, you must label it with a revision that matches the label on istiod.

  4. Configure the validating webhook so that it can locate the istiod service with the revision label:

    kubectl apply -f istiod-service.yaml
    

    This command creates a service entry that lets the validating webhook automatically check configurations before they are applied.

Private

In the following, you add the service.beta.kubernetes.io/aws-load-balancer-internal annotation to all services that Anthos Service Mesh creates. When this annotation is present, Anthos clusters on AWS creates private Ingress services.

  1. If needed, change to the istio-1.7.8-asm.10 directory. The istioctl client is version dependent. Make sure that you use the version in the istio-1.7.8-asm.10/bin directory.

  2. Save the following YAML to a file called istio-operator-internal-lb.yaml:

    apiVersion: install.istio.io/v1alpha1
    kind: IstioOperator
    spec:
      components:
        ingressGateways:
        - enabled: true
          k8s:
            serviceAnnotations:
              service.beta.kubernetes.io/aws-load-balancer-internal: "true"
          name: istio-ingressgateway
    
  3. Run the following command to install Anthos Service Mesh. If you want to enable a supported optional feature, include -f and the YAML filename on the following command line. See Enabling optional features for more information.

    bin/istioctl install \
     -f manifests/profiles/asm-multicloud.yaml \
     --set revision=asm-178-10 \
     -f istio-operator-internal-lb.yaml
    

    The --set revision argument adds a revision label in the format istio.io/rev=asm-178-10 to istiod. The revision label is used by the automatic sidecar injector webhook to associate injected sidecars with a particular istiod revision. To enable sidecar auto-injection for a namespace, you must label it with a revision that matches the label on istiod.

  4. Configure the validating webhook so that it can locate the istiod service with the revision label:

    kubectl apply -f istiod-service.yaml
    

    This command creates a service entry that lets the validating webhook automatically check configurations before they are applied.

Installing without Prometheus and Kiali

By default in Anthos Service Mesh 1.7 and earlier, Anthos Service Mesh installs Prometheus and Kiali from their original package repositories at docker.io and quay.io. If you don't want to install these tools or allow connections to these repositories, pass -set addonComponents.prometheus.enabled=false and --set addonComponents.kiali.enabled=false to istioctl install. For example, use the following command to exclude Prometheus and Kiali from the public subnet installation installation.

  bin/istioctl install \
    -f manifests/profiles/asm-multicloud.yaml \
    --set addonComponents.prometheus.enabled=false \
    --set addonComponents.kiali.enabled=false \
    --revision=asm-178-10

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

You have now installed the Anthos Service Mesh control plane with the preinstalled Ingress Gateway. If you only need ingress functionality using an Ingress controller, you are ready to install applications on your cluster. See Creating an example Deployment, which shows how to configure an Ingress resource.

If you want to take advantage of all the features that Anthos Service Mesh provides, continue with the next phase of the installation to inject sidecar proxies and restart your workloads.

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. To inject your Pods with the sidecar proxy, you configure automatic sidecar proxy injection (auto-injection) by labeling your namespaces with the same revision label that you set on istiod when you installed Anthos Service Mesh.

  • You need to enable auto-injection on any namespaces with workloads that were running on your cluster before you installed Anthos Service Mesh.

  • Before you deploy new workloads, make sure to configure auto-injection so that Anthos Service Mesh can monitor and secure traffic.

To enable auto-injection:

  1. Use the following command to locate the revision label on istiod:

    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-178-10-5788d57586-bljj4   1/1     Running   0          23h   app=istiod,istio.io/rev=asm-178-10,istio=istiod,pod-template-hash=5788d57586
    istiod-asm-178-10-5788d57586-vsklm   1/1     Running   1          23h   app=istiod,istio.io/rev=asm-178-10,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-178-10.

  2. Apply the revision label and remove the istio-injection label if it exists. In the following command, NAMESPACE is the name of the namespace where you want to enable auto-injection, and REVISION is the revision label you noted in the previous step.

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

    You can ignore the message "istio-injection not found" in the output. That means that the namespace didn't previously have the istio-injection label, which you should expect in new installations of Anthos Service Mesh or new deployments. Because auto-injection fails if a namespace has both the istio-injection and the revision label, all kubectl label commands in the Anthos Service Mesh documentation include removing the istio-injection label.

  3. If workloads were running on your cluster before you installed Anthos Service Mesh, restart the Pods to trigger re-injection.

    How you restart Pods depends on your application and the environment the cluster is in. For example, in your staging environment, you might simply delete all the Pods, which causes them to restart. But in your production environment, you might have a process that implements a blue-green deployment so that you can safely restart Pods to avoid traffic interruption.

    You can use kubectl to perform a rolling restart:

    kubectl rollout restart deployment -n NAMESPACE
    
  4. Verify that your Pods are configured to point to the new version of istiod.

    kubectl get pods -n NAMESPACE -l istio.io/rev=REVISION
    

Accessing the Ingress Gateway

Anthos Service Mesh provides a preconfigured Ingress Gateway, the istio-ingressgateway, that you can use to manage inbound traffic to applications running on your service mesh. To make applications accessible from outside of your cluster, (such as from a browser):

  • You need to get the external IP address or host name and port of the external load balancer that the istio-ingressgateway is configured to use.

  • Your application must define a Gateway and VirtualService resource, similar to the Online Boutique sample application's frontend-gateway.yaml.

To get the external address of the istio-ingressgateway:

  1. Create the INGRESS_HOST environment variable:

    export INGRESS_HOST=$(kubectl -n istio-system get service istio-ingressgateway -o jsonpath='{.status.loadBalancer.ingress[0].hostname}')
    
  2. Create the INGRESS_PORT environment variable:

    export INGRESS_PORT=$(kubectl -n istio-system get service istio-ingressgateway -o jsonpath='{.spec.ports[?(@.name=="http2")].port}')
    
  3. To test, deploy a sample application, such as the Online Boutique.

  4. To access the application on your browser, use the value of $INGRESS_HOST:$INGRESS_PORT in the URL.

Troubleshooting

Anthos clusters on AWS requires tags on subnets that contain load balancer endpoints. Anthos clusters on AWS automatically tags all subnets specified in the spec.Networking.ServiceLoadBalancerSubnetIDs field of the AWSCluster resource.

If you would like to add additional subnets to your user cluster, or if you need to re-apply tags to existing subnets, perform the following steps.

  1. From your anthos-aws directory, use anthos-gke to switch context to your management service.

    cd anthos-aws
    anthos-gke aws management get-credentials

  2. Get the ID of your cluster's AWS VPC with kubectl and store it as a variable.

     export VPC_ID=$(\
     env HTTP_PROXY=http://localhost:8118 \
     kubectl get awscluster cluster-0 -o jsonpath='{.spec.networking.vpcID}')
    
  3. Check the variables content with echo. The output resembles vpc-12345678abcdef0.

    echo $VPC_ID
    
  4. Save your cluster ID into an environment variable.

    export CLUSTER_ID=$(\
    env HTTP_PROXY=http://localhost:8118 \
    kubectl get awscluster cluster-0 -o jsonpath='{.status.clusterID}')
    

    You can check the variable with echo:

    echo $CLUSTER_ID
    

    The response includes your cluster ID.

    gke-12345678
    
  5. If you installed Anthos clusters on AWS into a dedicated VPC, you can use the aws command-line tool to retrieve the subnet ID.

    Select from the following options:

    • Public, if you want to expose Services on your public subnet.
    • Private, if you want to expose Services on your private subnet.
    • Multiple subnets, if you want to expose Services on multiple subnets.

    Public

     export SUBNET_ID=$(aws ec2 describe-subnets \
     --filters "Name=vpc-id,Values=$VPC_ID" "Name=tag:Name,Values=*public*" \
     --query "Subnets[*].SubnetId" \
     --output text)
    

    The output is an object that contains your subnet ID. It resembles subnet-1234abcdefg. You can check the variable with echo:

    echo $SUBNET_ID
    

    The response includes your subnet ID.

    subnet-012345678abcdef
    

    Private

     export SUBNET_ID=$(aws ec2 describe-subnets \
     --filters "Name=vpc-id,Values=$VPC_ID" "Name=tag:Name,Values=*private*" \
     --query "Subnets[*].SubnetId" \
     --output text)
    

    The output is an object that contains your subnet ID. It resembles subnet-1234abcdefg. You can check the variable with echo:

    echo $SUBNET_ID
    

    The response includes your subnet ID.

    subnet-012345678abcdef
    

    Multiple subnets

    If you are using multiple subnets for your AWSNodePools (for example, if you use multiple availability zones), you need to tag your subnet IDs individually.

    Retrieve your list of subnet IDs with aws ec2 describe-subnets.

    To get a list of all public subnets, run the following command:

    aws ec2 describe-subnets \
     --filters "Name=vpc-id,Values=$VPC_ID" "Name=tag:Name,Values=*public*" \
     --query "Subnets[*].SubnetId" \
     --output text
    

    To get a list of all private subnets, run the following command:

    aws ec2 describe-subnets \
     --filters "Name=vpc-id,Values=$VPC_ID" "Name=tag:Name,Values=*private*" \
     --query "Subnets[*].SubnetId" \
     --output text
    

    The response includes your subnet IDs.

    subnet-012345678abcdef
    subnet-abcdef123456789
    subnet-123456789abcdef
    
  6. Tag your subnet with your cluster ID. If you have multiple subnets, select Multiple subnets.

    Single subnet

    aws ec2 create-tags \
    --resources $SUBNET_ID \
    --tags Key=kubernetes.io/cluster/$CLUSTER_ID,Value=shared
    

    Multiple subnets

    For each of your subnets, run the following command:

    aws ec2 create-tags \
    --resources subnet-ids \
    --tags Key=kubernetes.io/cluster/$CLUSTER_ID,Value=shared
    

    Replace subnet-ids with the list of subnet IDs, separated by spaces. For example, subnet-012345678abcdef subnet-abcdef123456789 subnet-123456789abcdef.

What's next

Create an example deployment on Anthos clusters on AWS.