Installing Istio

The general way of installing Istio is to download Istio using the provided link and run a shell, which will install Istio on our system, including the istioctl component. Then, we need to use istioctl to install Istio within a Kubernetes cluster. However, since we’re using GitOps, we will use the GitOps principles to install it. Istio offers another method to install Istio – that is, using Helm. Since we know that Argo CD supports Helm, we will use that instead.

Therefore, we will create new Argo CD applications to deploy it. We will create an Argo CD application for istio-base, istiod, and ingress. The following YAML describes istio-base:

apiVersion: argoproj.io/v1alpha1
kind: Application
metadata:
  name: istio-base
  namespace: argo
spec:
  project: default
  source:
    chart: base
    repoURL: https://istio-release.storage.googleapis.com/charts
   ...