DevOpsDays Houston 2024: Kubernetes at Scale Going Multi-Cluster with Istio

Kubernetes changed the way organizations deploy and scale applications. Unlike the traditional methods of configuring infrastructure procedurally, Kubernetes requires operators to define the desired state of their application while it handles the rest.

As organizations who adopt Kubernetes scale their infrastructure, they soon encounter challenges ranging from “downtime due to problems with a Kubernetes cluster” to “messy shared development environments.” To overcome these challenges, they began to go multi-cluster with the help of service meshes like Istio.

Divine and Jubril will start this session by discussing the multi-cluster strategy of deploying applications on Kubernetes and how Istio service mesh streamlines its implementation and management. After that, to demo, they will connect two Kubernetes clusters to form a multi-cluster setup. With the infrastructure in place, they will demonstrate how to mirror services across clusters.

Towards the end, using Istio traffic shift and split features, they will demonstrate rerouting traffic seamlessly from the primary cluster to the secondary in the event of failures or for A/B testing purposes.

By the end of this talk, attendees will be equipped with the knowledge to assess if multi-clusters would benefit their organizations and will have practical knowledge on how to implement a multi-cluster deployment.

1. 1
Kubernetes at Scale:
Going Multi-Cluster
with Istio
Webinar
Divine Odazie
DevOpsDays Houston 2024
Jubril Oyetunji

2. 22
Divine Odazie
●Technology Evangelist
at Severalnines
●Electrical/Electronics Engineering
●Certified Kubernetes Application
Developer (CKAD)
●Certified AWS Solutions
Architect
●Excited to speak at DevOpsDays
Houston 2024!!
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3. 33
Jubril Oyetunji
●Independent Software
Engineer & Technical Writer
●Loves making Terraform
providers
●Dabbles in IOT
●Excited to speak at
DevOpsDays Houston 2024!!
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4. 4
1.What is Multi-Cluster?
2.What is a Service Mesh?
3.Why Multi-Cluster?
4.Demo: Multi-Cluster with Istio
5.Challenges with multi-cluster
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5. 5
What is Multi-Cluster?
Multi-cluster Kubernetes is exactly
what it sounds like.
It refers to an architecture that
distributes applications and data two
or more Kubernetes clusters.
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6. 6
Service mesh

A service mesh is a dedicated infrastructure
layer that facilitates service-to-service
communication.
It provides traffic management, security,
observability, without any code changes




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7. 7
Istio service mesh
●“Istio” is Greek for sail
●Built on top of Envoy proxy
●CNCF graduated project
●Secure service communication with
TLS & strong authentication
●Load balancing for various traffic
types
●Fine-grained traffic control & routing
●Policy layer for access, rate limits &
quotas, etc.




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8. 8
Why
Multi-Cluster?


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9. 9
Disaster recovery
A multi-cluster set up can significantly
enhance your disaster recovery capabilities
by distributing your workloads across
geographically dispersed clusters.

Istio specifically has the concept of failovers
to help migrate traffic from a failing cluster.



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10. 10
Localization
Multi-Cluster can be useful for delivering you
applications closer to your users. This can
help you:
-Reduce latency
-Improve response times
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11. 11
Kubernetes upgrades
With Multi-Cluster you can experiment with
different versions of Kubernetes in a controlled
fashion.


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Public Cloud Co-Location On-Premises

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A/B Testing
Targeted Rollouts with Traffic Splitting
Deploy different application versions (A/B) to
specific clusters within the multi-cluster mesh.
Istio routes traffic percentages to each version
for controlled testing
Built-in monitoring capabilities to gather data on
user behavior and application performance for
both versions




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Multi-Cloud/Hybrid Environments
Flexibility and Cost Optimization
●Utilize the strengths of different
cloud providers for specific
workloads.

●Potentially achieve better pricing
by avoiding vendor lock-in.



Leverage Existing Infrastructure
●Integrate on-prem workloads with
cloud deployments for a hybrid
approach.

●Migrate workloads to the cloud at
your own pace.



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14. 14
Webinar
14
Going
Multi-Cluster
with Istio
Service Mesh
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15. 15 15
Prerequisites
Two Kubernetes clusters
Istioctl – Istio’s configuration
command line utility
Istio Repo

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16. 16




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Multi-Cluster setup
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Install Istio

1 2 3
Install the east-west gateway Deploy your services

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Challenges with
Multi-Cluster
●Cost
●Can be painful at times
●Increased deployment complexity
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20. 20
Tech Evangelist @ Severalnines
Divine Odazie
@_Odazie
Independent Software Engineer
Jubril Oyetunji
@s1ntaxe770r