Deploy Bookinfo and Manage Traffic

Istio, as an open-source service mesh solution, provides powerful features of traffic management for microservices. Here is the introduction of traffic management from the official website of Istio:

Istio’s traffic routing rules let you easily control the flow of traffic and API calls between services. Istio simplifies configuration of service-level properties like circuit breakers, timeouts, and retries, and makes it easy to set up important tasks like A/B testing, canary rollouts, and staged rollouts with percentage-based traffic splits. It also provides out-of-box failure recovery features that help make your application more robust against failures of dependent services or the network.

KubeSphere provides three kinds of grayscale strategies based on Istio, including blue-green deployment, canary release and traffic mirroring.

Among others, a canary release represents an effective software development strategy in which a new version is deployed for testing with the base version preserved in the production environment. This strategy will bring part of the traffic to the new version being tested and the production release takes up the rest.

Objective

In this tutorial, you will learn how to deploy a sample application Bookinfo composed of four separate microservices and use the traffic management feature of KubeSphere to publish a new version.

Prerequisites

  • You need to enable KubeSphere Service Mesh.

  • You need to finish all tasks in Create Workspace, Project, Account and Role.

  • You need to enable Application Governance. To do so, follow the steps below:

    Log in the console as project-admin and go to your project. Navigate to Advanced Settings under Project Settings, click Edit, and select Edit Gateway. In the dialog that appears, flip on the toggle switch next to Application Governance.

edit-gateway

switch-application-governance

Note

You need to enable Application Governance so that you can use the Tracing feature. Once it is enabled, please check whether an annotation (e.g. nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/service-upstream: true) is added for your route (Ingress) if the route is inaccessible.

Estimated Time

About 20 minutes.

What is Bookinfo Application

The Bookinfo application is composed of four separate microservices as shown below. There are three versions of the reviews microservice.

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

The end-to-end architecture of the application is shown below. See Bookinfo Application for more details.

Bookinfo Application

Hands-on Lab

Task 1: Deploy Bookinfo

  1. Log in the console as project-regular and enter demo-project. Navigate to Applications under Application Workloads, and click Deploy Sample Application on the right.

sample-bookinfo

  1. Click Next in the dialog that appears where required fields are pre-populated and relevant components are already set. You do not need to change the setting and just click Create in the final page (Internet Access).

create-bookinfo

  1. In Workloads, make sure the status of all four deployments displays running, which means the app has been created successfully.

running

Note

It may take a few minutes before the deployments are up and running.

Task 2: Access Bookinfo

  1. In Applications, go to Composing App and click the app bookinfo to see its detailed information.

click-bookinfo

Note

If you do not see the app in the list, refresh your page.

  1. In the detail page, record the hostname and port number of the app which will be used to access Bookinfo.

Deploy Bookinfo and Manage Traffic - 图8

  1. As the app will be accessed outside the cluster via NodePort, you need to open the port in the image above (in this case, the port number is 32277) in your security group for outbound traffic and set any port forwarding rules if necessary.
  2. Edit your local host file (/etc/hosts) by adding an entry in it to map the hostname to the public IP address. For example:
  1. # {Public IP} {hostname}
  2. 139.198.19.38 productpage.demo-project.192.168.0.2.nip.io

Warning

Do not copy the content above directly to your local host file. Please replace it with your own public IP address and hostname.

  1. When you finish, click the button Click to visit to access the app.

click-to-visit

  1. In the app detail page, click Normal user in the bottom-left corner.

normal-user

  1. In the image below, you can notice that only Reviewer1 and Reviewer2 are displayed without any stars in the Book Reviews section. This is the status of this app version. In the task below, you can see a different UI appearance through a canary release.

Deploy Bookinfo and Manage Traffic - 图11

Task 3: Create Canary Release

  1. Go back to KubeSphere console and select Grayscale Release. Click Create Canary Release Job and you will be directed to Grayscale Release section of the project. Select Canary Release and click Create Job.

Deploy Bookinfo and Manage Traffic - 图12

create-job

  1. Add a name (e.g. canary-release) and click Next. Select reviews as the component to roll out a change and click Next.

Deploy Bookinfo and Manage Traffic - 图14

  1. In the next dialog, enter v2 as Grayscale Release Version Number and change the image to kubesphere/examples-bookinfo-reviews-v2:1.13.0 (v1 changed to v2). Click Next to continue.

release-version

  1. The canary release supports two release strategies: Forward by traffic ratio and Forward by request content. In this tutorial, please select Forward by traffic ratio and set the same traffic ratio for v1 and v2 (50% each). You can click the icon in the middle and move leftwards or rightwards to change the traffic ratio. Click Create to finish the setting.

Deploy Bookinfo and Manage Traffic - 图16

  1. The job created will display in Job Status.

canary-release-test

Task 4: Verify Canary Release

Visit the Bookinfo website again and refresh your browser repeatedly. You will be able to see the Book Reviews section switched between v1 and v2 at a rate of 50%.

verify-canary-release

Task 5: View Network Topology

  1. Execute the following command in the machine where KubeSphere runs to bring in real traffic to simulate the access to Bookinfo every 0.5 seconds.
  1. watch -n 0.5 "curl http://productpage.demo-project.192.168.0.2.nip.io:32277/productpage?u=normal"

Note

Make sure you replace the project name, IP address and port number in the above command with your own.

  1. In Traffic Management, you can see communications, dependency, health and performance among different microservices.

traffic-management

  1. Click a component (e.g. reviews) and you can see the information of traffic monitoring on the right, displaying real-time data of Traffic, Success rate and Duration.

real-time-data

Task 6: View Tracing Details

KubeSphere provides the distributed tracing feature based on Jaeger, which is used to monitor and troubleshoot microservices-based distributed applications.

  1. In Tracing tab, you can clearly see all phases and internal calls of requests, as well as the period in each phase.

tracing

  1. Click any item, and you can even drill down to see request details and where this request is being processed (which machine or container).

tracing-kubesphere

Task 7: Take Over All Traffic

With the canary release, you can test the new version online by bringing in part of the actual traffic and collect user feedback. If everything runs smoothly without any issues, you can bring all the traffic to the new version.

  1. In Grayscale Release, click the canary release job.

open-canary-release

  1. In the dialog that appears, click the three dots of reviews v2 and select Take Over. It means 100% of the traffic will be sent to the new version (v2).

Deploy Bookinfo and Manage Traffic - 图24

Note

If anything goes wrong with the new version, you can roll back to the previous version v1 anytime.

  1. Open the Bookinfo page again and refresh the browser several times. You can find that it only shows the result of reviews v2 (i.e. ratings with black stars).

Deploy Bookinfo and Manage Traffic - 图25

Task 8: Remove the Old Version

Now that the new version v2 takes over all the traffic successfully, you can remove the old version and release the resources of v1 based on your needs.

Warning

After you remove a certain version, related workloads and Istio-based configuration resources will also be deleted.

  1. In Grayscale Release, click the canary release job.

open-canary-release

  1. In the dialog that appears, click Job offline to remove the old version.

job-offline

The above tasks serve as a example of how to adopt a canary release to control traffic and publish a new version of your app. You can also try different strategies in Grayscale Release or see related sections in Project Administration and Usage.

Reference

Bookinfo Application