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Guides Overview

There are several guides available. To follow the guides included in this section, you will need at least two Kubernetes clusters with Gloo Mesh installed on one. You can easily set up two such clusters using Kind as detailed below. Some of the guides also make use of the Bookinfo sample application. You can install the application by following the steps in the Bookinfo deployment section.

To become familiar with Gloo Mesh, we recommend following the guides in the order that they appear here, starting from the top and going down.

Pre-requisites

There are three pre-requisites to following these guides:

Install kubectl
- https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/tools/install-kubectl/
Install meshctl
- https://github.com/solo-io/gloo-mesh/releases
Have multiple Kubernetes clusters ready to use, accessible in different kubeconfig contexts. If you don't have access to multiple Kubernetes clusters, see the section below, Using Kind to use Kubernetes in Docker (Kind) to spin up two clusters in containers.

Assumptions made in the guides

We will assume in this guide that you have access to two clusters and the following two contexts are available in your kubeconfig file.

Your actual context names will likely be different.

mgmt-cluster-context
- kubeconfig context pointing to a cluster where we will install and operate Gloo Mesh
remote-cluster-context
- kubeconfig context pointing to a cluster where we will install and manage a service mesh using Gloo Mesh

We assume you've installed Gloo Mesh into the cluster represented by the context mgmt-cluster-context.

Two registered clusters

We also assume you've registered both of those clusters with Gloo Mesh:

meshctl cluster register \
  --cluster-name mgmt-cluster \
  --remote-context $MGMT_CONTEXT

meshctl cluster register \
  --cluster-name remote-cluster \
  --remote-context $REMOTE_CONTEXT

At this point we have two clusters, mgmt-cluster and remote-cluster both registered with Gloo Mesh which happens to be installed on the mgmt-cluster cluster.

Using Kind

Kubernetes in Docker makes it easy to stand up Kubernetes clusters on your local desktop for testing and development. To assist with learning about Gloo Mesh, you can use Kind to deploy two Kubernetes clusters. You can install Kind by following the installation steps in their Quick Start guide.

Once you have Kind installed, you can create the two clusters in question by running the following:

meshctl demo istio-multicluster init

The command will do the following:

Create two kind clusters: mgmt-cluster and remote-cluster
Install Gloo Mesh on the management plane cluster
Install Istio on both clusters
Register both clusters with Gloo Mesh

You should now be ready to start going through the guides.

Bookinfo deployment

For some parts of the guide, you'll want to have the Bookinfo demo deployed to two clusters.

You'll want to first have Istio installed for multi-cluster before installing the Bookinfo demo.

The core components, including reviews-v1 and reviews-v2, are deployed to the management plane cluster, while reviews-v3 is deployed on the remote cluster.

Deploy part of the bookinfo application to the mgmt-cluster cluster:

Be sure to switch the kubeconfig context to the mgmt-cluster

# Set the proper context value for each cluster
MGMT_CONTEXT=your_management_plane_context
REMOTE_CONTEXT=your_remote_context

kubectl config use-context $MGMT_CONTEXT

kubectl create ns bookinfo
kubectl label namespace bookinfo istio-injection=enabled

# we deploy everything except reviews-v3 to the management plane cluster
kubectl apply -n bookinfo -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/istio/istio/release-1.8/samples/bookinfo/platform/kube/bookinfo.yaml -l 'app,version notin (v3)'
kubectl apply -n bookinfo -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/istio/istio/release-1.8/samples/bookinfo/platform/kube/bookinfo.yaml -l 'account'

Now deploy only reviews-v3 to your remote-cluster-context cluster:

kubectl config use-context $REMOTE_CONTEXT

kubectl create ns bookinfo
kubectl label namespace bookinfo istio-injection=enabled

kubectl apply -n bookinfo -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/istio/istio/release-1.8/samples/bookinfo/platform/kube/bookinfo.yaml -l 'app,version in (v3)' 
kubectl apply -n bookinfo -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/istio/istio/release-1.8/samples/bookinfo/platform/kube/bookinfo.yaml -l 'service=reviews' 
kubectl apply -n bookinfo -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/istio/istio/release-1.8/samples/bookinfo/platform/kube/bookinfo.yaml -l 'account=reviews' 
kubectl apply -n bookinfo -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/istio/istio/release-1.8/samples/bookinfo/platform/kube/bookinfo.yaml -l 'app=ratings' 
kubectl apply -n bookinfo -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/istio/istio/release-1.8/samples/bookinfo/platform/kube/bookinfo.yaml -l 'account=ratings'

Now you have Bookinfo demo set up for the rest of the guides. From here you can federate your two clusters, or start configuring multi-cluster access and traffic policy.