Istio Service Mesh Workshop

Welcome to the Istio Service Mesh Workshop. This workshop is designed to help you understand, deploy, and manage Istio service mesh in your Kubernetes environment. Through hands-on exercises and detailed explanations, you will learn how to leverage Istio’s powerful features to enhance the security, observability, and reliability of your microservices architecture.

Prerequisites

This workshop assumes the following:

  • Basic understanding of Kubernetes concepts (pods, services, deployments)

  • Familiarity with containerization and microservices architecture

  • Access to a Kubernetes cluster

  • Command-line experience with oc (OpenShift CLI)

If you are new to service meshes or Istio, we recommend reviewing the official Istio documentation before proceeding.

Workshop Structure

This workshop is divided into four modules:

  • Module 1: Overview - Introduction to Istio, Envoy, and sidecar architecture. Learn about the benefits of Istio, the strengths of Envoy proxy, and the basics of sidecar architecture. Hands-on exercises cover enabling sidecar injection and configuring mutual TLS (mTLS).

  • Module 2: Traffic Management - Learn how traffic enters the mesh through Gateways and how VirtualServices route traffic within the mesh. Exercises include creating Gateways, implementing path-based routing, weighted traffic splitting for canary deployments, and combining Gateways with VirtualServices.

  • Module 3: Advanced Traffic Management and Security - Explore advanced DestinationRule features including load balancing, failover, and circuit breaking. Learn how to implement request authentication with JWT and create authorization policies for fine-grained access control.

  • Module 4: Observability - Understand how Istio provides metrics, traces, and logs in standard formats. Learn to access Envoy metrics and logs directly from sidecar proxies, and explore observability data using built-in Istio tools without external dependencies.

Learning Objectives

After completing this workshop, you will be able to:

  • Understand the core concepts and benefits of service mesh technology, including Istio and Envoy

  • Enable sidecar injection and configure mutual TLS (mTLS) for secure service-to-service communication

  • Create and configure Gateways to manage external traffic entry points

  • Implement VirtualServices for sophisticated traffic routing, including path-based routing and weighted traffic splitting

  • Configure DestinationRules for load balancing, failover, and circuit breaking

  • Implement request authentication and authorization policies to secure your services

  • Access and analyze metrics and logs directly from Envoy sidecar proxies

  • Use Istio’s built-in observability features to monitor and troubleshoot your service mesh

  • Troubleshoot common issues and optimize Istio configurations