Azure

Follow these instructions to prepare an Azure cluster for Istio.

Azure offers a managed control plane add-on for the Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), which you can use instead of installing Istio manually. Please refer to Deploy Istio-based service mesh add-on for Azure Kubernetes Service for details and instructions.

You can deploy a Kubernetes cluster to Azure via AKS or AKS-Engine (DEPRECATED) which fully supports Istio.

AKS

You can create an AKS cluster via the az cli or the Azure portal.

For the az cli option, complete az login authentication OR use cloud shell, then run the following commands below.

1. Determine the desired region name which supports AKS

   $ az provider list --query "[?namespace=='Microsoft.ContainerService'].resourceTypes[] | [?resourceType=='managedClusters'].locations[]" -o tsv

2. Verify the supported Kubernetes versions for the desired region

   Replace my location using the desired region value from the above step, and then execute:

   $ az aks get-versions --location "my location" --query "orchestrators[].orchestratorVersion"

   At the time of this document update, the minimum supported AKS Kubernetes version is 1.24.9

3. Create the resource group and deploy the AKS cluster

   Replace myResourceGroup and myAKSCluster with desired names, my location using the value from step 1, 1.10.5 if not supported in the region, and then execute:

   $ az group create --name myResourceGroup --location "my location"
   $ az aks create --resource-group myResourceGroup --name myAKSCluster --node-count 3 --kubernetes-version 1.10.5 --generate-ssh-keys

4. Get the AKS kubeconfig credentials

   Replace myResourceGroup and myAKSCluster with the names from the previous step and execute:

   $ az aks get-credentials --resource-group myResourceGroup --name myAKSCluster

AKS-Engine

The AKS Engine project is deprecated for Azure public cloud customers. Please consider using Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) with the Istio add-on for managed Kubernetes or Cluster API Provider Azure for self-managed Kubernetes.

1. Follow the instructions to get and install the aks-engine binary.

2. Download the aks-engine API model definition that supports deploying Istio:

   $ wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Azure/aks-engine/master/examples/service-mesh/istio.json

   Note: It is possible to use other API model definitions which will work with Istio. The MutatingAdmissionWebhook and ValidatingAdmissionWebhook admission control flags and RBAC are enabled by default. See aks-engine API model default values for further information.

3. Deploy your cluster using the istio.json template. You can find references to the parameters in the official docs.

   Parameter	Expected value
   subscription_id	Azure Subscription Id
   dns_prefix	Cluster DNS Prefix
   location	Cluster Location

   $ aks-engine deploy --subscription-id <subscription_id> \
    --dns-prefix <dns_prefix> --location <location> --auto-suffix \
    --api-model istio.json

   After a few minutes, you can find your cluster on your Azure subscription in a resource group called <dns_prefix>-<id>. Assuming dns_prefix has the value myclustername, a valid resource group with a unique cluster ID is mycluster-5adfba82. The aks-engine generates your kubeconfig file in the _output folder.

4. Use the <dns_prefix>-<id> cluster ID, to copy your kubeconfig to your machine from the _output folder:

   $ cp \_output/<dns_prefix>-<id>/kubeconfig/kubeconfig.<location>.json \
    ~/.kube/config

   For example:

   $ cp \_output/mycluster-5adfba82/kubeconfig/kubeconfig.westus2.json \
    ~/.kube/config