Bookinfo Application

This example deploys a sample application composed of four separate microservices used to demonstrate various Istio features.

If you installed Istio using the Getting Started instructions, you already have Bookinfo installed and you can skip most of these steps and go directly to Define the service versions.

The application displays information about a book, similar to a single catalog entry of an online book store. Displayed on the page is a description of the book, book details (ISBN, number of pages, and so on), and a few book reviews.

The Bookinfo application is broken into four separate microservices:

  • productpage. The productpage microservice calls the details and reviews microservices to populate the page.
  • details. The details microservice contains book information.
  • reviews. The reviews microservice contains book reviews. It also calls the ratings microservice.
  • ratings. The ratings microservice contains book ranking information that accompanies a book review.

There are 3 versions of the reviews microservice:

  • Version v1 doesn’t call the ratings service.
  • Version v2 calls the ratings service, and displays each rating as 1 to 5 black stars.
  • Version v3 calls the ratings service, and displays each rating as 1 to 5 red stars.

The end-to-end architecture of the application is shown below.

Bookinfo Application without Istio
Bookinfo Application without Istio

This application is polyglot, i.e., the microservices are written in different languages. It’s worth noting that these services have no dependencies on Istio, but make an interesting service mesh example, particularly because of the multitude of services, languages and versions for the reviews service.

Before you begin

If you haven’t already done so, setup Istio by following the instructions in the installation guide.

Istio supports the Kubernetes Gateway API and intends to make it the default API for traffic management in the future. The following instructions allow you to choose to use either the Gateway API or the Istio configuration API when configuring traffic management in the mesh. Follow instructions under either the Gateway API or Istio APIs tab, according to your preference.

Note that the Kubernetes Gateway API CRDs do not come installed by default on most Kubernetes clusters, so make sure they are installed before using the Gateway API:

  1. $ kubectl get crd gateways.gateway.networking.k8s.io &> /dev/null || \
  2.   { kubectl apply -f https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/gateway-api/releases/download/v1.1.0/standard-install.yaml; }

Deploying the application

To run the sample with Istio requires no changes to the application itself. Instead, you simply need to configure and run the services in an Istio-enabled environment, with Envoy sidecars injected along side each service. The resulting deployment will look like this:

Bookinfo Application
Bookinfo Application

All of the microservices will be packaged with an Envoy sidecar that intercepts incoming and outgoing calls for the services, providing the hooks needed to externally control, via the Istio control plane, routing, telemetry collection, and policy enforcement for the application as a whole.

Start the application services

If you use GKE, please ensure your cluster has at least 4 standard GKE nodes. If you use Minikube, please ensure you have at least 4GB RAM.

  1. Change directory to the root of the Istio installation.

  2. The default Istio installation uses automatic sidecar injection. Label the namespace that will host the application with istio-injection=enabled:

    1. $ kubectl label namespace default istio-injection=enabled

  3. Deploy your application using the kubectl command:

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    1. $ kubectl apply -f @samples/bookinfo/platform/kube/bookinfo.yaml@

    The command launches all four services shown in the bookinfo application architecture diagram. All 3 versions of the reviews service, v1, v2, and v3, are started.

    In a realistic deployment, new versions of a microservice are deployed over time instead of deploying all versions simultaneously.

  4. Confirm all services and pods are correctly defined and running:

    1. $ kubectl get services
    2. NAME          TYPE        CLUSTER-IP   EXTERNAL-IP   PORT(S)    AGE
    3. details       ClusterIP   10.0.0.31    <none>        9080/TCP   6m
    4. kubernetes    ClusterIP   10.0.0.1     <none>        443/TCP    7d
    5. productpage   ClusterIP   10.0.0.120   <none>        9080/TCP   6m
    6. ratings       ClusterIP   10.0.0.15    <none>        9080/TCP   6m
    7. reviews       ClusterIP   10.0.0.170   <none>        9080/TCP   6m

    and

    1. $ kubectl get pods
    2. NAME                             READY     STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
    3. details-v1-1520924117-48z17      2/2       Running   0          6m
    4. productpage-v1-560495357-jk1lz   2/2       Running   0          6m
    5. ratings-v1-734492171-rnr5l       2/2       Running   0          6m
    6. reviews-v1-874083890-f0qf0       2/2       Running   0          6m
    7. reviews-v2-1343845940-b34q5      2/2       Running   0          6m
    8. reviews-v3-1813607990-8ch52      2/2       Running   0          6m

  5. To confirm that the Bookinfo application is running, send a request to it by a curl command from some pod, for example from ratings:

    1. $ kubectl exec "$(kubectl get pod -l app=ratings -o jsonpath='{.items[0].metadata.name}')" -c ratings -- curl -sS productpage:9080/productpage | grep -o "<title>.*</title>"
    2. <title>Simple Bookstore App</title>

Determine the ingress IP and port

Now that the Bookinfo services are up and running, you need to make the application accessible from outside of your Kubernetes cluster, e.g., from a browser. A gateway is used for this purpose.

  1. Create a gateway for the Bookinfo application:

    Create an Istio Gateway using the following command:

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    1. $ kubectl apply -f @samples/bookinfo/networking/bookinfo-gateway.yaml@
    2. gateway.networking.istio.io/bookinfo-gateway created
    3. virtualservice.networking.istio.io/bookinfo created

    Confirm the gateway has been created:

    1. $ kubectl get gateway
    2. NAME               AGE
    3. bookinfo-gateway   32s

    Follow these instructions to set the INGRESS_HOST and INGRESS_PORT variables for accessing the gateway. Return here, when they are set.

    These instructions assume that your Kubernetes cluster supports external load balancers (i.e., Services of type LoadBalancer). Refer to ingress control for details.

    Create a Kubernetes Gateway using the following command:

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    1. $ kubectl apply -f @samples/bookinfo/gateway-api/bookinfo-gateway.yaml@
    2. gateway.gateway.networking.k8s.io/bookinfo-gateway created
    3. httproute.gateway.networking.k8s.io/bookinfo created

    Because creating a Kubernetes Gateway resource will also deploy an associated proxy service, run the following command to wait for the gateway to be ready:

    1. $ kubectl wait --for=condition=programmed gtw bookinfo-gateway

    Get the gateway address and port from the bookinfo gateway resource:

    1. $ export INGRESS_HOST=$(kubectl get gtw bookinfo-gateway -o jsonpath='{.status.addresses[0].value}')
    2. $ export INGRESS_PORT=$(kubectl get gtw bookinfo-gateway -o jsonpath='{.spec.listeners[?(@.name=="http")].port}')

  2. Set GATEWAY_URL:

    1. $ export GATEWAY_URL=$INGRESS_HOST:$INGRESS_PORT

Confirm the app is accessible from outside the cluster

To confirm that the Bookinfo application is accessible from outside the cluster, run the following curl command:

  1. $ curl -s "http://${GATEWAY_URL}/productpage" | grep -o "<title>.*</title>"
  2. <title>Simple Bookstore App</title>

You can also point your browser to http://$GATEWAY_URL/productpage to view the Bookinfo web page. If you refresh the page several times, you should see different versions of reviews shown in productpage, presented in a round robin style (red stars, black stars, no stars), since we haven’t yet used Istio to control the version routing.

Define the service versions

Before you can use Istio to control the Bookinfo version routing, you need to define the available versions.

Istio uses subsets, in destination rules, to define versions of a service. Run the following command to create default destination rules for the Bookinfo services:

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  1. $ kubectl apply -f @samples/bookinfo/networking/destination-rule-all.yaml@

The default and demo configuration profiles have auto mutual TLS enabled by default. To enforce mutual TLS, use the destination rules in samples/bookinfo/networking/destination-rule-all-mtls.yaml.

Wait a few seconds for the destination rules to propagate.

You can display the destination rules with the following command:

  1. $ kubectl get destinationrules -o yaml

Unlike the Istio API, which uses DestinationRule subsets to define the versions of a service, the Kubernetes Gateway API uses backend service definitions for this purpose.

Run the following command to create backend service definitions for the three versions of the reviews service:

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  1. $ kubectl apply -f @samples/bookinfo/platform/kube/bookinfo-versions.yaml@

What’s next

You can now use this sample to experiment with Istio’s features for traffic routing, fault injection, rate limiting, etc. To proceed, refer to one or more of the Istio Tasks, depending on your interest. Configuring Request Routing is a good place to start for beginners.

Cleanup

When you’re finished experimenting with the Bookinfo sample, uninstall and clean it up using the following command:

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  1. $ @samples/bookinfo/platform/kube/cleanup.sh@