Installing on Kubernetes

Instructions for installing the Istio control plane on Kubernetes and adding virtual machines into the mesh.

Visit our getting started guide to learn how to evaluate and try Istio’s basic features quickly.

Istio offers multiple installation flows depending on your platform and whether or not you intend to use Istio in production. At a high level, the basic flow is the same regardless of platform:

1. Review the pod requirements
2. Prepare your platform for Istio
3. Download the Istio release
4. Install Istio on your platform

Installing Istio

Choose one of the following installation options, depending on your intended use:

• Demo installation: This option is ideal if you’re new to Istio and just want to try it out. It allows you to experiment with many Istio features with modest resource requirements.

• Custom installation with Helm: This option is ideal to install Istio for production use or for performance evaluation.

• Supported platform installation: This option is ideal if your platform provides native support for Istio-enabled clusters with a configuration profile corresponding to your intended use.

After choosing an option and installing Istio on your cluster, you can deploy your own applications or experiment with some of our tasks and examples.

When you’re ready to consider more advanced Istio use cases, check out the following resources:

• To install using Istio’s Container Network Interface (CNI) plugin, visit our CNI guide.

• To perform a multicluster setup, visit our multicluster installation documents.

• To expand your existing mesh with additional containers or VMs not running on your mesh’s Kubernetes cluster, follow our mesh expansion guide.

• To add services requires a detailed understanding of sidecar injection. Visit our sidecar injection guide to learn more.

Downloading the release

Istio is installed in its own istio-system namespace and can manage services from all other namespaces.

1. Go to the Istio release page to download the installation file corresponding to your OS. On a macOS or Linux system, you can run the following command to download and extract the latest release automatically:

   $ curl -L https://git.io/getLatestIstio | ISTIO_VERSION=1.2.5 sh -
   

2. Move to the Istio package directory. For example, if the package is istio-1.2.5:

   $ cd istio-1.2.5
   

   The installation directory contains:

   • Installation YAML files for Kubernetes in install/kubernetes
   • Sample applications in samples/
   • The istioctl client binary in the bin/ directory. istioctl is used when manually injecting Envoy as a sidecar proxy.

3. Add the istioctl client to your PATH environment variable, on a macOS or Linux system:

   $ export PATH=$PWD/bin:$PATH
   

4. You can enable the auto-completion option when working with a bash or ZSH console.