Platform-Specific Prerequisites

This document covers any platform or environment specific prerequisites for installing Istio in ambient mode.

Platform

Minikube

  1. If you are using Minikube with the Docker driver, you must append --set cni.cniNetnsDir="/var/run/docker/netns" to the helm install command so that the istio-cni node agent can correctly manage and capture pods on the node.

CNI

Cilium

  1. Cilium currently defaults to proactively deleting other CNI plugins and their config, and must be configured with cni.exclusive = false to properly support chaining. See the Cilium documentation for more details.

  2. Due to how Cilium manages node identity and internally allow-lists node-level health probes to pods, applying default-DENY NetworkPolicy in a Cilium CNI install underlying Istio in ambient mode, will cause kubelet health probes (which are by-default exempted from NetworkPolicy enforcement by Cilium) to be blocked.

    This can be resolved by applying the following CiliumClusterWideNetworkPolicy:

    1. apiVersion: "cilium.io/v2"
    2. kind: CiliumClusterwideNetworkPolicy
    3. metadata:
    4.   name: "allow-ambient-hostprobes"
    5. spec:
    6.   description: "Allows SNAT-ed kubelet health check probes into ambient pods"
    7.   endpointSelector: {}
    8.   ingress:
    9.   - fromCIDR:
    10.     - "169.254.7.127/32"

    Please see issue #49277 and CiliumClusterWideNetworkPolicy for more details.