Incorporating Istio into your Kubernetes cluster

In this section, we will install Istio in a fresh cluster and explore all the service goodness it provides.

Preparing a minikube cluster for Istio

We will use a minikube cluster for checking out Istio. Before installing Istio, we should make sure our cluster has enough capacity to handle Istio as well as its demo application, BookInfo. We will start minikube with 16 GB of memory and four CPUs, which should be adequate. Make sure the Docker VM you’re using (e.g., Rancher Desktop) has sufficient CPU and memory:

$ minikube start --memory=16384 --cpus=4

Minikube can provide a load balancer for Istio. Let’s run this command in a separate terminal as it will block (do not stop the tunnel until you are done):

$ minikube tunnel
  Tunnel successfully started
  NOTE: Please do not close this terminal as this process must stay alive for the tunnel to be accessible ...

Minikube sometimes doesn’t clean...