🌐 Cloud & Kubernetes Track

Service Mesh Setup

Deploy Istio service mesh to add observability, intelligent traffic routing, and automatic mTLS to your microservices.

⏱️ 10-14 hours 🎯 Advanced 💼 Portfolio Ready

📋 Project Overview

As microservices architectures grow, managing service-to-service communication becomes complex. Service meshes solve this by adding a dedicated infrastructure layer for handling service mesh communication.

You'll deploy Istio, configure traffic management rules, enable distributed tracing with Jaeger, and enforce zero-trust security with automatic mutual TLS.

✅ Prerequisites

Required Knowledge

  • • Kubernetes intermediate (Ingress, Services)
  • • Microservices architecture basics
  • • HTTP/gRPC networking
  • • Basic cryptography (TLS/mTLS)

Tools Needed

  • • Kubernetes cluster (>=4 CPUs)
  • • istioctl CLI
  • • kubectl CLI
  • • Helm (optional)

🎯 What You'll Learn

📊

Observability

Distributed tracing with Jaeger and metrics with Prometheus

🔀

Traffic Management

Canary deployments, A/B testing, circuit breakers

🔐

Zero-Trust Security

Automatic mTLS and policy-based access control

🌍

Gateway Configuration

Ingress/Egress gateways for north-south traffic

🔨 Implementation Guide

Step 1: Install Istio

Use the demo profile for learning purposes

curl -L https://istio.io/downloadIstio | sh - cd istio-* export PATH=$PWD/bin:$PATH istioctl install --set profile=demo -y

Step 2: Enable Sidecar Injection

Label namespace for automatic sidecar injection

kubectl label namespace default istio-injection=enabled kubectl rollout restart deployment -n default

Step 3: Configure Traffic Routing (Canary)

Route 90% traffic to v1, 10% to v2

apiVersion: networking.istio.io/v1beta1 kind: VirtualService metadata: name: my-service spec: hosts: - my-service http: - match: - headers: user-type: exact: beta-tester route: - destination: host: my-service subset: v2 - route: - destination: host: my-service subset: v1 weight: 90 - destination: host: my-service subset: v2 weight: 10

Step 4: Enable Distributed Tracing

Deploy Jaeger for request tracing

kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/istio/istio/release-1.20/samples/addons/jaeger.yaml istioctl dashboard jaeger

📦 Deliverables

  • ✓ Working Istio installation with sidecar injection enabled
  • ✓ Canary deployment demonstrating 90/10 traffic split
  • ✓ Jaeger UI showing distributed traces across services
  • ✓ mTLS verification showing encrypted service-to-service communication

📚 Resources

Istio Documentation

Official Istio docs and tutorials

Jaeger Tracing

Distributed tracing platform