Mete Atamel

In one of my previous posts, I showed how to install Istio on minikube and deploy the sample BookInfo app. A new Istio version is out (0.8.0) with a lot of changes, especially changes on traffic management, which made my steps in the previous post a little obsolete.

In this post, I want to show how to install Istio 0.8.0 on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), deploy the sample BookInfo app and show some of the add-ons and traffic routing.

After my trip in Istanbul, I visited my parents in Nicosia, Cyprus for a long weekend. Then, I stopped by in Amsterdam for Codemotion before coming back to London for Devoxx 4 cities in 4 countries in 1 week was exhausting but also a lot of fun in many ways.

Codemotion Amsterdam

Amsterdam is almost a second home to me nowadays. There’s a great tech scene and a lot of tech events throughout the year, as a result, I end up visiting Amsterdam at least 2–3 times a year.

Istanbul is one of those crazy dynamic cities with friendly people, amazing history, great shopping and above all, a food heaven. Naturally, I was excited to be back for Java Day Istanbul conference.

I came a day early to meet with a partner and visit a customer. They had lots of questions on Kubernetes and hybrid-cloud. It was quite useful for me to hear about their challenges about moving to the cloud and propose some solutions.

After my time in Beijing, I flew back to the UK but instead of London, I went to Manchester for IPExpo conference. The first time I visited Manchester was 20 years ago. I was a 15 year old high school kid and I visited my great aunt and uncle one summer with my sister. I remember I had such a good time back then.

Unfortunately, I never had a chance to visit Manchester again and it was quite nostalgic for me to be back. I was hoping that I would remember Manchester a little bit but to my surprise, it was like a brand new city to me.

Visiting a new country is always extra special for me and a couple of weeks ago, I got to do just that and visited Beijing, China for the first time.

After TDC in Floripa, I flew to Beijing for QCon conference and for a Google Developer Group (GDG) meetup. It was the first time for me in China (my 48th country!) and first time speaking at QCon, so I was naturally excited. I didn’t know what to expect in Beijing but I was pleasantly surprised. Beijing is a modern city with good public transportation and interesting sites to visit. I got the feeling that it’s also very international with many expats, definitely more than I expected. I visited the iconic sites like Tiananmen Square and the Great Wall of China. I also visited Google’s Beijing office (my 35th Google office visit!)

Last week, I was in my favorite country, Brazil, for The Developer Conference (TDC) in Florianópolis (aka Floripa). I went to Brazil for the first time last July. Since then, I’ve been there 3 more times and I gradually fell in love with it. People are friendly, their BBQ is amazing, scenery is beautiful. I always have a good time in Brazil and this time wasn’t an exception.

In all previous times, I was mainly in Sao Paulo for a conference followed by a short trip to Rio (my favorite city!) for myself. This time, I went to Florianópolis which is a city to the south of Sao Paulo. It has a similar feeling as Rio (i.e. beach town) but smaller and felt safer than Rio. It had amazing views of mountains and sea, great food and friendly people, as always the case with Brazil.

As part of my Istio 101 talk, I like to show demos locally (because conference Wifi can be unreliable) and Minikube is perfect for this. Minikube gives you a local Kubernetes cluster on top of which you can install Istio.

In this post, I want to show how to do Istio 101 on Minikube. More specifically, I will show how to install Istio, deploy a sample application, install add-ons like Prometheus, Grafana, Zipkin, ServiceGraph and change traffic routes dynamically.

Last week, I was in one of my favorite cities, Rome, for Codemotion conference. There are many cities to see in the world and normally, I do not like to revisit cities that I’ve been before. However, Rome is a great exception. It was my fifth visit there over the years and it was still as exciting as the first time. I also found out that Google has a small office in Rome, so I paid a quick visit next morning before attending the conference.

Container virtualization is a rapidly evolving technology that can simplify how you deploy and manage distributed applications. When people discuss containers, they usually mean Linux-based containers. This makes sense, because native Linux kernel features like cgroups introduced the idea of resource isolation, eventually leading to containers as we know them today.

For a long time, you could only containerize Linux processes, but Microsoft introduced support for Windows-based containers in Windows Server 2016 and Windows 10. With this, you can now take an existing Windows application, containerize it using Docker, and run it as an isolated container on Windows. Microsoft supports two flavors of Windows containers: Windows Server and Hyper-V. You can build Windows containers on either the microsoft/windowsservercore and microsoft/nanoserver base images. You can read more about Windows containers in the Microsoft Windows containers documentation.

I’ve been recently looking into Istio, an open platform to connect and manage microservices. After Containers and Kubernetes, I believe that Istio is the next step in our microservices journey where we standardize on tools and methods on how to manage and secure microservices. Naturally, I was very excited to get my hands on Istio.

While setting up Istio on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) is pretty straightforward, it’s always useful to have a local setup for debugging and testing. I specifically wanted to setup Istio on my local Minikube Kubernetes cluster on my Windows machine. I ran into a few minor issues that I want to outline here in case it is useful to someone out there.