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Upgrade ambient service meshes

Upgrade your ambient control and data plane components in your Gloo Mesh cluster.

Considerations

Before you upgrade your ambient components, review the following limitations and recommendations.

Revision and canary upgrade limitations

The upgrade guides in this documentation show you how to perform in-place upgrades for your Istio components, which is the recommended upgrade strategy.

CNI upgrades

In an ambient installation, the istio-cni pods are enhanced for safe in-place upgrades. When istio-cni is scheduled for removal, it determines whether an upgrade is in process by checking the value of AGENT_UPGRADE_ID in the istio-cni ConfigMap against its internal upgrade ID. If the removal is due to an upgrade, istio-cni creates a “stub” CNI plug-in in its place on the node. This stub CNI plug-in stalls any newly scheduled pods on that node, and does not allow the pods to spin up until the replacement istio-cni is up and running.

ztunnel upgrades

As Kubernetes dynamically upgrades the ztunnel deployment by restarting the old ztunnel pods, all long-lived connections on the node are dropped. You can influence the duration of the downtime with the termination grace period of the ztunnel pod, which determines the drain period. Any TCP connections that are longer than the grace period are dropped. Alternatively, you might cordon nodes and use blue/green node pools to limit the number of active pods that are in the process of upgrading.

Version and license requirements

Verify that the minor version of the Solo distribution of Istio that you want to upgrade to is tested and supported for your Gloo Mesh version. To find the available patch versions, you can get the minor version repo URL from the Istio images built by Solo.io support article, and check the patch version builds in that repo.
Check the Istio release notes for the upgrade version to prepare for any breaking changes.
Be sure to review the following known Istio version restrictions.
- Single cluster setups:
  - In Gloo Mesh version 2.6 and later, ambient mode requires the Solo distribution of Istio version 1.22.3 or later (1.22.3-solo).
  - In Istio 1.22.0-1.22.3, the ISTIO_DELTA_XDS environment variable must be set to false. For more information, see this upstream Istio issue. Note that this issue is resolved in Istio 1.22.4.

Single cluster

Upgrade istioctl

Save the details for the version of the Solo distribution of Istio that you want to upgrade to.
1. Save the Solo distribution of Istio patch version and tag.
```
  export ISTIO_VERSION=1.23.4
# Change the tags as needed
export ISTIO_IMAGE=${ISTIO_VERSION}-solo
  
```
2. Save the repo key for the minor version of the Solo distribution of Istio that you want to install. This is the 12-character hash at the end of the repo URL us-docker.pkg.dev/gloo-mesh/istio-<repo-key>, which you can find in the Istio images built by Solo.io support article.
```
  # 12-character hash at the end of the minor version repo URL
export REPO_KEY=<repo_key>
export REPO=us-docker.pkg.dev/gloo-mesh/istio-${REPO_KEY}
export HELM_REPO=us-docker.pkg.dev/gloo-mesh/istio-helm-${REPO_KEY}
  
```

Upgrade your istioctl CLI client to the new version.

  curl -L https://istio.io/downloadIstio | ISTIO_VERSION=${ISTIO_VERSION} sh -
cd istio-${ISTIO_VERSION}
export PATH=$PWD/bin:$PATH

Upgrade CRDs and istiod

Upgrade the custom resources of the Kubernetes Gateway API to the latest supported version, 1.1.0.

  kubectl apply -f https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/gateway-api/releases/download/v1.1.0/standard-install.yaml

Upgrade the Istio CRDs to the new version.

  helm get values istio-base -n istio-system -o yaml > istio-base.yaml
helm upgrade istio-base oci://${HELM_REPO}/base \
--namespace istio-system \
--version ${ISTIO_IMAGE} \
-f istio-base.yaml

notifications

If you see an error such as Error: UPGRADE FAILED: Rendered manifests contain a resource that already exists, see the community Istio docs.

Get the current values for the istiod Helm release in your cluster.

  helm get values istiod -n istio-system -o yaml > istiod.yaml
open istiod.yaml

Make edits to the istiod Helm values, and save the file. If you update the Istio minor version, such as in the global.tag field, be sure to also update the value of the hub field to the repo for the correct version of the Solo distribution of Istio.

Upgrade your Helm release with the updated values.

  helm upgrade istiod oci://${HELM_REPO}/istiod \
-n istio-system \
--version ${ISTIO_IMAGE} \
-f istiod.yaml

Verify that the istiod pods are successfully restarted. Note that it might take a few seconds for the pods to become available.
```
  kubectl get pods -n istio-system | grep istiod
  
```
Example output:
```
  istiod-b84c55cff-tllfr   1/1     Running   0          58s
  
```

Upgrade the CNI and ztunnel

info

If your changes include upgrading the Istio version of the components, be sure to upgrade the istiod control plane before you upgrade the CNI and ztunnel components. Otherwise, these components might have an outdated image.

For the component that you want to update, get the current values for its Helm release in your cluster.

  helm get values istio-cni -n istio-system -o yaml > cni.yaml
open cni.yaml

  helm get values ztunnel -n istio-system -o yaml > ztunnel.yaml
open ztunnel.yaml

  helm get values istio-cni -n kube-system -o yaml > cni.yaml
open cni.yaml

  helm get values ztunnel -n kube-system -o yaml > ztunnel.yaml
open ztunnel.yaml

Make edits to the Helm values of the components that you want to upgrade, and save the files. If you update the Istio minor version, such as in tag fields, be sure to also update the value of the hub field to the repo for the correct version of the Solo distribution of Istio.

Upgrade your Helm releases with the updated values.

  helm upgrade istio-cni oci://${HELM_REPO}/cni -n istio-system --version ${ISTIO_IMAGE} -f cni.yaml

  helm upgrade ztunnel oci://${HELM_REPO}/ztunnel -n istio-system --version ${ISTIO_IMAGE} -f ztunnel.yaml

  helm upgrade istio-cni oci://${HELM_REPO}/cni -n kube-system --version ${ISTIO_IMAGE} -f cni.yaml

  helm upgrade ztunnel oci://${HELM_REPO}/ztunnel -n kube-system --version ${ISTIO_IMAGE} -f ztunnel.yaml

Verify that the ztunnel and Istio CNI pods are successfully restarted. Note that it might take a few seconds for the pods to become available.

  kubectl get pods -n istio-system

  kubectl get pods -n kube-system

Example output:

  istiod-85c4dfd97f-mncj5            1/1     Running   0             42s
istio-cni-node-pr5rl               1/1     Running   0             42s
istio-cni-node-pvmx2               1/1     Running   0             42s
istio-cni-node-lcrcd               1/1     Running   0             42s
ztunnel-tvtzn                      1/1     Running   0             40s
ztunnel-vtpjm                      1/1     Running   0             40s
ztunnel-hllxg                      1/1     Running   0             40s

Upgrade ambient service meshes

Considerations link

Single cluster link

Upgrade istioctl link

Upgrade CRDs and istiod link

Upgrade the CNI and ztunnel link

Considerations

Single cluster

Upgrade istioctl

Upgrade CRDs and istiod

Upgrade the CNI and ztunnel