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At the end of this chapter you would have setup the environment and tools that are required for the demo.

Download Tools

We will be using the following tools as part of the tutorial. Please have them installed and configured before proceeding further.

Tool macos linux windows
direnv brew install direnv Install N.A
helm brew install helm Package Managers choco install kubernetes-helm
multipass brew install multipass Download Download
jq brew install jq Install choco install yq
kubectl brew install kubectl Download choco install kubernetes-cli
Python3 brew install kubectl Download Download
stern(optional) brew install stern Download Download

Download Sources

git clone https://github.com/kameshsampath/gloo-mesh-vm-demo
cd gloo-mesh-vm-demo

For the rest of the instructions, the cloned sources folder will be referred to as $DEMO_HOME.

Ensure Environment

Assuming you have downloaded direnv and hooked it to your shell.

direnv allow .

Setup Ansible Environment

The demo will be using Ansible to setup the environment, run the following command to install Ansible modules and extra collections and roles the will be used for various tasks.

make setup-ansible

Important

The demo uses direnv to create a local Python Virtual Environment.

Ansible Variables

Variable Description Default Value Ansible Role
work_dir The work directory on the local machine {{ playbook_dir }}/work
kubeconfig_dir The directory to save all the kubeconfig files {{ work_dir }}/.kube
kubernetes_cli_version the kubectl version v1.21.8
k3s_cluster_cidr The Cluster CIDR(cluster-cidr) for Kubernetes Clusters 172.16.0.0/24 k3s
k3s_service_cidr The Service CIDR(service-cidr) for Kubernetes Clusters 172.18.0.0/20 k3s
istio_enabled Whether to configure the vms with Istio Sidecar yes Workload
istio_vm_app VM application name recommendation Workload
istio_vm_namespace The namespace in Kubernetes cluster i.e. cluster1 default Workload
istio_vm_workdir The work dir in vm where the Istio Sidecar files will be created /home/{{ ansible_user }}/istio-vm/files Workload
istio_vm_service_account The Kubernetes Service Account to use when creating VM resources in Kubernetes vm-service-account Workload
istio_cluster_network The Istio Cluster Network the network network1 Workload
istio_vm_network The Istio network for VM communication Workload
istio_cluster The Istio cluster name. The name in this demo maps to Kubernetes cluster context where to install Istio i.e cluster1 and the same is used as SPIFEE trustDomain cluster1 Workload
istio_cluster_service_ip_cidr The Cluster Service IP CIDR to use with istio_cluster {{ k3s_service_cidr }} Workload
istio_cluster_pod_ip_cidr The Cluster IP CIDR to use with istio_cluster {{ k3s_cluster_cidr }} Workload
workload_istio_ns The namespace where Istio Control Plane is deployed in istio_cluster {{ k3s_cluster_cidr }} Workload
workload_istio_gateway_ns The namespace where Istio Ingress gateway is deployed in istio_cluster {{ k3s_cluster_cidr }} Workload
clean_istio_vm_files Clean the generated Istio sidecar VM files including the directories where it was copied in the VM yes Workload
force_app_install Clean install the VM application no Workload

Apart from the variables defined, there are three other variables that controls the setup,

  • multipass_vms - defines a dictionary of VMs that needs to be created. For more details check the multipass role
multipass_vms:
 # the name of the VM
 - name: mgmt
   # cpus to allocate
   cpus: 4
   # memory to allocate
   mem: 8g
   # disk size
   disk: 30g
   # roles of this vm
   role:
    - kubernetes
    - gloo
    - management
 - name: cluster1
   cpus: 4
   mem:  8g
   disk: 30g
   role:
    - kubernetes
    - gloo
    - workload
 - name: vm1
   cpus: 2
   mem: 2g
   disk: 30g
   role:
     - vm
  • gloo_clusters - the Kubernetes clusters that wil be used for gloo deployment
gloo_clusters:
  # name of the cluster
  mgmt:
    # cloud where its deployed
    cloud: k3s
    # the Kubernetes Context name, recommended it to be the name of VM where k3s runs
    k8s_context: mgmt
    # logical cluster name to be used while registering it with meshctl
    cluster_name: mgmt
  cluster1:
    cloud: k3s
    k8s_context: cluster1
    cluster_name: cluster1
  • istio_clusters - the Kubernetes clusters where Istio will be deployed
istio_clusters:
   # name of the cluster
   cluster1:
     # Kubernetes Context to use for this cluster
     k8s_context: "{{ gloo_clusters.cluster1.k8s_context }}"
     # The version of Istio that needs to be deployed
     version: "{{ lookup('env','ISTIO_VERSION') }}"
     install: yes

Tip

The demo uses asdf-vm to handle multiple versions of a software e.g. Python, Istio. Check out https://github.com/kameshsampath/asdf-istio

The setup uses direnv and the playbooks generates the .envrc using template form $DEMO_HOME/templates/.envrc. If needed adjust the .envrc template and rerun the create-vms and create-kubernetes-clusters task to refresh or update it.

Create Virtual Machines

For the demo we will be using multipass to create and run virtual machines. Run the following command to create the virtual machines,

make create-vms

The previous command would have created three VMs namely,

  • mgmt - which will act as Gloo Management Kubernetes cluster.
  • cluster1 - The Kubernetes cluster where Istio and its workloads will be deployed. The Virtual Machine workloads will use the Istio Control Plane(CP) opn this cluster for its services.
  • vm1 - the Virtual Machine which will hold a small workload that will be connected to cluster1.

You can always get the information about the multipass VM using the command,

multipass info <vm name>
# e.g. 
multipass info cluster1

That should give an information like,

Name:           cluster1
State:          Running
IPv4:           192.168.64.90
                172.16.0.0
Release:        Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS
Image hash:     8fbc4e8c6e33 (Ubuntu 20.04 LTS)
Load:           2.37 1.88 1.76
Disk usage:     5.3G out of 28.9G
Memory usage:   1.8G out of 7.8G
Mounts:         --

The task finally generates Ansible Hosts inventory based on the template from $DEMO_HOME/templates/hosts.j2, which will be used as inventory in other playbook runs.

Setup Kubernetes Clusters

As part of this demo we will be setting up k3s Kubernetes clusters. The k3s clusters will be a single node cluster run via multipass VM. We will configure that to with the following flags,

  • --cluster-cidr=172.16.0.0/24 allows us to create 65 – 110 Pods on this node
  • --service-cidr=172.18.0.0/20 allows us to create 4096 services
  • --disable=traefik disable traefik deployment

Check the GKE doc1 for a reference on how to calculate the number of pods and service with given CIDR range.

Run the following command to deploy the clusters to our mgmt and cluster1 VMs.

make create-kubernetes-clusters

The previous step we should have two Kubernetes clusters mgmt and cluster1 and as convenience it merges the two cluster kubeconfig into one as $DEMO_HOME/work/.kube/config which is set as the current shell $KUBECONFIG value. So doing kubectl config get-contexts now should return you two contexts.

CURRENT   NAME       CLUSTER    AUTHINFO   NAMESPACE
          cluster1   cluster1   cluster1
*         mgmt       mgmt       mgmt

Note

The k3s deployment as part of this demo will be using Calico which enables us to define routes to the Kubernetes services/pods via its host.

Setup Gloo

Let us setup on the mgmt cluster. The setup uses the Gloo Enterprise License, if you don’t have one please request 30 day trial one via solo.io. Set the License key via as $GLOO_MESH_GATEWAY_LICENSE_KEY environment variable and then run the following command to deploy Gloo Mesh,

make deploy-gloo

Ensure Gloo mesh is setup correctly,

meshctl check server

Gloo Mesh Management Cluster Installation
--------------------------------------------

🟢 Gloo Mesh Pods Status
+----------+------------+-------------------------------+-----------------+
| CLUSTER  | REGISTERED | DASHBOARDS AND AGENTS PULLING | AGENTS PUSHING  |
+----------+------------+-------------------------------+-----------------+
| cluster1 | true       |                             2 |               1 |
+----------+------------+-------------------------------+-----------------+

🟢 Gloo Mesh Agents Connectivity

Management Configuration
---------------------------

🟢 Gloo Mesh CRD Versions

🟢 Gloo Mesh Networking Configuration Resources

Setup Istio

Lets now complete the environment setup part by deploying Istio on to cluster1. We use Istio 1.11.5 for this tutorial but any version greater than 1.11.x should work.

make deploy-istio

Important

The Istio setup for this demo uses revisioned Control Plane deployment.

Lets check if Istio setup is done correctly,

istioctl verify-install --context=$CLUSTER1

The command should show the following output ( trimmed for brevity),

...
Checked 13 custom resource definitions
Checked 1 Istio Deployments
✔ Istio is installed and verified successfully

  1. https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/docs/concepts/alias-ips ↩