Deploy Sample Apps

Now that we have all the resources installed for Istio, we will use sample application called BookInfo to review key capabilities of the service mesh such as intelligent routing, and review telemetry data using Prometheus & Grafana.

Sample Apps

Sample Apps

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.

Deploy Sample Apps

Deploy sample apps by manually injecting istio proxy and confirm pods, services are running correctly

kubectl apply -f <(istioctl kube-inject -f samples/bookinfo/platform/kube/bookinfo.yaml)

The output from

kubectl get pod,svc

Should look similar to:


NAME                              READY     STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
details-v1-64558cf56b-dxbx2       2/2       Running   0          14s
productpage-v1-5b796957dd-hqllk   2/2       Running   0          14s
ratings-v1-777b98fcc4-5bfr8       2/2       Running   0          14s
reviews-v1-866dcb7ff-k69jm        2/2       Running   0          14s
reviews-v2-6d7959c9d-5ppnc        2/2       Running   0          14s
reviews-v3-7ddf94f545-m7vls       2/2       Running   0          14s

NAME          TYPE        CLUSTER-IP       EXTERNAL-IP   PORT(S)    AGE
details       ClusterIP   10.100.102.153   <none>        9080/TCP   17s
kubernetes    ClusterIP   10.100.0.1       <none>        443/TCP    138d
productpage   ClusterIP   10.100.222.154   <none>        9080/TCP   17s
ratings       ClusterIP   10.100.1.63      <none>        9080/TCP   17s
reviews       ClusterIP   10.100.255.157   <none>        9080/TCP   17s

Next we’ll define the virtual service and ingress gateway:

kubectl apply -f samples/bookinfo/networking/bookinfo-gateway.yaml

Next, we’ll query the DNS name of the ingress gateway and use it to connect via the browser.

kubectl get service istio-ingressgateway -o jsonpath='{.status.loadBalancer.ingress[0].hostname}' -n istio-system ; echo

This may take a minute or two, first for the Ingress to be created, and secondly for the Ingress to hook up with the services it exposes.

To test, do the following:

  1. Open a new browser tab
  2. Paste the DNS endpoint returned from the previous get service istiogateway command
  3. Add /productpage to the end of that DNS endpoint
  4. Hit enter to retrieve the page.

Remember to add /productpage to the end of the URI in the browser to see the sample webpage!

Sample Apps

Click reload multiple times to see how the layout and content of the reviews changes as differnt versions (v1, v2, v3) of the app are called.