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Important Project Notice

This project is no longer under active development. It will be preserved here for the foreseeable future for reference. Please note that the last version released works with Istio 0.7.

NGINX Architecture with Istio Service Mesh

This repository provides an implementation of a NGINX based service mesh (nginMesh). nginMesh is compatible with Istio. It leverages NGINX as a sidecar proxy.

What is Service Mesh and Istio?

Please check https://istio.io for a detailed explanation of the service mesh.

Production Status

The current version of nginMesh is designed to work with Istio release 0.7.1. It should not be used in production environments.

Demo

Recorded demo of nginMesh depoyment.

Architecture

The diagram below depicts how an NGINX sidecar proxy is implemented. The sidecar uses the open source version of NGINX compiled with modules for tracing and monitoring.

Alt text

The diagram below is an alternative architectural view -

Alt text

To learn more about the sidecar implementation, see this document.

Quick Start

Below are instructions to quickly install and configure nginMesh. Currently, only Kubernetes environment is supported.

Prerequisites

Make sure you have a cluster with Kubernetes 1.9 or newer. Please see Prerequisites for setting up a kubernetes cluster.

Install Istio and nginMesh

nginMesh requires installation of Istio first.

Download and install Istio 0.7.1:

curl -L https://git.io/getLatestIstio | ISTIO_VERSION=0.7.1 sh -

Download nginMesh release 0.7.1:

curl -L https://github.com/nginxinc/nginmesh/releases/download/v0.7.1/nginmesh-0.7.1.tar.gz | tar zx

Deploy Istio:

kubectl create -f istio-0.7.1/install/kubernetes/istio.yaml

Ensure the following Kubernetes services are deployed: istio-pilot, istio-mixer, istio-ingress:

kubectl get svc  -n istio-system

istio-ingress            LoadBalancer   10.47.252.40    35.237.173.47   80:32171/TCP,443:32198/TCP                   19h
istio-mixer              ClusterIP      10.47.251.225   <none>          9091/TCP,15004/TCP,9093/TCP,9094/TCP,9102/TCP,9125/UDP,42422/TCP    19h
istio-pilot              ClusterIP      10.47.254.118   <none>          15003/TCP,15005/TCP,15007/TCP,15010/TCP,8080/TCP,9093/TCP,443/TCP   19h
istio-sidecar-injector   ClusterIP      10.47.242.139   <none>          443/TCP                                       9h

Ensure the following Kubernetes pods are up and running: istio-pilot-* , istio-mixer-* , istio-ingress-* and istio-initializer-*:

kubectl get pods -n istio-system

istio-ca-86f55cc46f-nprhw                1/1       Running   0          19h
istio-ingress-5bb556fcbf-c7tgt           1/1       Running   0          19h
istio-mixer-86f5df6997-fvzjx             3/3       Running   0          19h
istio-pilot-67d6ddbdf6-xhztz             2/2       Running   0          19h
istio-sidecar-injector-5b8c78fd6-8dvq6   1/1       Running   0          9h

Enable automatic sidecar injection:

nginmesh-0.7.1/install/kubernetes/install-sidecar.sh

Verify that the istio-injection label is not applied to the default namespace:

kubectl get namespace -L istio-injection

NAME           STATUS        AGE       ISTIO-INJECTION
default        Active        1h        
istio-system   Active        1h        
kube-public    Active        1h        
kube-system    Active        1h

Deploy a Sample Application

In this section we deploy the Bookinfo application, which is taken from the Istio samples. Please see Bookinfo for more details.

Label the default namespace with istio-injection=enabled:

kubectl label namespace default istio-injection=enabled

Deploy the application:

kubectl apply -f  istio-0.7.1/samples/bookinfo/kube/bookinfo.yaml

Confirm that all application services are deployed: productpage, details, reviews, ratings:

kubectl get services

NAME                       CLUSTER-IP   EXTERNAL-IP   PORT(S)              AGE
details                    10.0.0.31    <none>        9080/TCP             6m
kubernetes                 10.0.0.1     <none>        443/TCP              7d
productpage                10.0.0.120   <none>        9080/TCP             6m
ratings                    10.0.0.15    <none>        9080/TCP             6m
reviews                    10.0.0.170   <none>        9080/TCP             6m

Confirm that all application pods are running --details-v1-* , productpage-v1-* , ratings-v1-* , reviews-v1-* , reviews-v2-* and reviews-v3-*:

kubectl get pods

NAME                                        READY     STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
details-v1-1520924117-48z17                 2/2       Running   0          6m
productpage-v1-560495357-jk1lz              2/2       Running   0          6m
ratings-v1-734492171-rnr5l                  2/2       Running   0          6m
reviews-v1-874083890-f0qf0                  2/2       Running   0          6m
reviews-v2-1343845940-b34q5                 2/2       Running   0          6m
reviews-v3-1813607990-8ch52                 2/2       Running   0          6m

Get the public IP of the Istio Ingress controller. If the cluster is running in an environment that supports external load balancers:
```
kubectl get svc -n istio-system | grep -E 'EXTERNAL-IP|istio-ingress'
```
Open the Bookinfo application in a browser using the following link:
```
http://<Public-IP-of-the-Ingress-Controller>/productpage
```

Uninstall the Application

To uninstall application, run:

./istio-0.7.1/samples/bookinfo/kube/cleanup.sh

Uninstall Istio

To uninstall the Istio core components:

kubectl delete -f istio-0.7.1/install/kubernetes/istio.yaml

To uninstall the initializer, run:

nginmesh-0.7.1/install/kubernetes/delete-sidecar.sh

Limitations

nginMesh has the following limitations:

TCP and gRPC traffic is not supported.
Quota Check is not supported.
Only Kubernetes is supported.

All sidecar-related limitations and supported traffic management rules are described here.