Istio on Azure Container Service (AKS)

Question

I was planning on installing Istio on my new AKS cluster. However, in the prerequisites for Istio, it is mentioned that K8S cluster should have RBAC enabled. However, I read that AKS ( preview ) doesn't have it enabled. Is this true? Is there an option for me to try Istio on AKS.

Answer 1

We are doing POC for service mesh on our AKS cluster using istio. I have found a very good guide to install istio with all its components on AKS cluster and it does not require any RBAC on AKS. Infact this guide is cloud agnostic. I am not sure if it production graded ready but working like a charm till now. Just apply first 3 files and 4th one optional. The name might be little confusing for you. But its working on AKS very well. Hope that worsk for you.

Istio Installation Files

kubectl apply -f 1-istio-init.yaml 2-istio-minikube.yaml 3-kiali-secret.yaml

Answer 2

AKS now enables RBAC by default.

There are also docs on how to install Istio:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/aks/istio-install

Answer 3

AKS is GA and looks like RBAC is available now, https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-kubernetes-service-aks-ga-new-regions-new-features-new-productivity/

Answer 4

In fact RBAC is not available in Azure AKS currently. According to this GitHub issue it is on the roadmap for Q1 2018.

In Azure you can use ACS which is an older version of AKS, but with control over Kubernetes master or acs-engine where you have full control over Kubernetes cluster.