Miscellaneous

 3 minute read

Verifying connectivity to Istio Pilot

Verifying connectivity to Pilot is a useful troubleshooting step. Every proxy container in the service mesh should be able to communicate with Pilot. This can be accomplished in a few simple steps:

  1. Get the name of the Istio Ingress pod:

    $ INGRESS_POD_NAME=$(kubectl get po -n istio-system | grep ingressgateway\- | awk '{print$1}'); echo ${INGRESS_POD_NAME};

  2. Exec into the Istio Ingress pod:

    $ kubectl exec -it $INGRESS_POD_NAME -n istio-system /bin/bash

  3. Test connectivity to Pilot using curl. The following example invokes the v1 registration API using default Pilot configuration parameters and mutual TLS enabled:

    $ curl -k --cert /etc/certs/cert-chain.pem --cacert /etc/certs/root-cert.pem --key /etc/certs/key.pem https://istio-pilot:8080/debug/edsz

    If mutual TLS is disabled:

    $ curl http://istio-pilot:8080/debug/edsz

You should receive a response listing the “service-key” and “hosts” for each service in the mesh.

No traces appearing in Zipkin when running Istio locally on Mac

Istio is installed and everything seems to be working except there are no traces showing up in Zipkin when there should be.

This may be caused by a known Docker issue where the time inside containers may skew significantly from the time on the host machine. If this is the case, when you select a very long date range in Zipkin you will see the traces appearing as much as several days too early.

You can also confirm this problem by comparing the date inside a Docker container to outside:

$ docker run --entrypoint date gcr.io/istio-testing/ubuntu-16-04-slave:latest
Sun Jun 11 11:44:18 UTC 2017

$ date -u
Thu Jun 15 02:25:42 UTC 2017

To fix the problem, you’ll need to shutdown and then restart Docker before reinstalling Istio.

Automatic sidecar injection fails if the Kubernetes API server has proxy settings

When the Kubernetes API server includes proxy settings such as:

env:
  - name: http_proxy
  value: http://proxy-wsa.esl.foo.com:80
  - name: https_proxy
  value: http://proxy-wsa.esl.foo.com:80
  - name: no_proxy
  value: 127.0.0.1,localhost,dockerhub.foo.com,devhub-docker.foo.com,10.84.100.125,10.84.100.126,10.84.100.127

With these settings, Sidecar injection fails. The only related failure log can be found in kube-apiserver log:

W0227 21:51:03.156818       1 admission.go:257] Failed calling webhook, failing open sidecar-injector.istio.io: failed calling admission webhook "sidecar-injector.istio.io": Post https://istio-sidecar-injector.istio-system.svc:443/inject: Service Unavailable

Make sure both pod and service CIDRs are not proxied according to *_proxy variables. Check the kube-apiserver files and logs to verify the configuration and whether any requests are being proxied.

A workaround is to remove the proxy settings from the kube-apiserver manifest and restart the server or use a later version of Kubernetes.

An issue was filed with Kubernetes related to this and has since been closed. https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/58698#discussion_r163879443

What Envoy version is Istio using?

To find out the Envoy version used in deployment, you can exec into the container and query the server_info endpoint:

$ kubectl exec -it PODNAME -c istio-proxy -n NAMESPACE /bin/bash
root@5c7e9d3a4b67:/# curl localhost:15000/server_info
envoy 0/1.9.0-dev//RELEASE live 57964 57964 0

In addition, the Envoy and istio-api repository versions are stored as labels on the image:

$ docker inspect -f '{{json .Config.Labels }}' ISTIO-PROXY-IMAGE
{"envoy-vcs-ref":"b3be5713f2100ab5c40316e73ce34581245bd26a","istio-api-vcs-ref":"825044c7e15f6723d558b7b878855670663c2e1e"}