These sample apps are used throughout the documentation to help test connectivity, such as in the traffic management, security, and resiliency policy guides.

Bookinfo

To test out microservice traffic management in your service mesh, deploy the Bookinfo sample app.

  1. Save the Istio revision that your istiod control plane runs as an environment variable.

      export REVISION=$(kubectl get pod -L app=istiod -n istio-system -o jsonpath='{.items[0].metadata.labels.istio\.io/rev}')
    echo $REVISION
      
  2. Create the bookinfo namespace and label it for Istio injection so that the services become part of the service mesh.

  3. Deploy the Bookinfo app.

      # deploy bookinfo application components for all versions less than v3
    kubectl -n bookinfo apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/istio/istio/1.20.4/samples/bookinfo/platform/kube/bookinfo.yaml -l 'app,version notin (v3)'
    # deploy an updated product page with extra container utilities such as 'curl' and 'netcat'
    kubectl -n bookinfo apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/solo-io/gloo-mesh-use-cases/main/policy-demo/productpage-with-curl.yaml
    # deploy all bookinfo service accounts
    kubectl -n bookinfo apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/istio/istio/1.20.4/samples/bookinfo/platform/kube/bookinfo.yaml -l 'account'
      
  4. Verify that the Bookinfo app is deployed successfully.

      kubectl get pods -n bookinfo
    kubectl get svc -n bookinfo
      

httpbin

The httpbin sample app is a simple tool to test HTTP requests and responses. Unlike curl, you can see not only the response headers, but also the request headers.

  1. Save the Istio revision that your istiod control plane runs as an environment variable.

      export REVISION=$(kubectl get pod -L app=istiod -n istio-system -o jsonpath='{.items[0].metadata.labels.istio\.io/rev}')
    echo $REVISION
      
  2. Create an httpbin namespace and label the namespace for Istio injection so that the services in the namespace become part of the service mesh.

  3. Deploy the httpbin app.

      kubectl -n httpbin apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/solo-io/gloo-mesh-use-cases/main/policy-demo/httpbin.yaml
      
  4. Verify that the httpbin app is running.

      kubectl -n httpbin get pods
      

hello world

The hello world sample app is a simple way to test responses for different app versions. The following examples install four versions of hello world in your cluster.

  1. Save the Istio revision that your istiod control plane runs as an environment variable.

      export REVISION=$(kubectl get pod -L app=istiod -n istio-system -o jsonpath='{.items[0].metadata.labels.istio\.io/rev}')
    echo $REVISION
      
  2. Create the helloworld namespace and label it for Istio injection so that the services become part of the service mesh.

  3. Deploy hello world v1, v2, v3, and v4 to your cluster.

      kubectl -n helloworld apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/solo-io/gloo-mesh-use-cases/main/policy-demo/helloworld.yaml 
      
  4. Verify that the hello world apps are running.

      kubectl -n helloworld get pods
      

Other service namespaces

For any other namespaces that you want to deploy apps to, be sure to follow these steps to include your services in the service mesh.

Now that Istio is up and running, you can create service namespaces for your teams to run app workloads in. For any namespaces that you want to deploy apps to, be sure to follow these steps to include your services in the service mesh.

  1. Label the namespace with the Istio revision so that Istio sidecars deploy to your app pods.

      export REVISION=$(kubectl get pod -L app=istiod -n istio-system -o jsonpath='{.items[0].metadata.labels.istio\.io/rev}')
    kubectl label ns <namespace> istio.io/rev=$REVISION --overwrite
      
  2. If you already deployed app pods to the namespace, restart the workloads so that sidecars are injected into the pods. For example, you might roll out a restart to each deployment by using a command similar to the following.

      kubectl rollout restart deployment -n <namespace> <deployment>
      

Next

Verify routing to the sample apps and apply a fault injection policy to the reviews service to delay requests and simulate network issues or an overloaded service.