Top 5 Istio Commands
The Istio project (and service mesh) has become a household name in the cloud-native world and for good reasons! Istio can sit on top of Kubernetes or as a control plane by itself, as long as it’s managing a fleet of services that route traffic through the Envoy proxy. Istio combines three great things into one — routing, observability, and security. One of the great items about Kubernetes early on when I was learning (well, I still am!) was the kubectl cheat sheet. In this post I hope to give you five new ways to debug what’s going on with Istio and a quick toolbox to turn to when you’re not sure what’s going on in your cluster. I assume you are running Istio on Kubernetes and have installed istioctl (some of the commands make use of it).
1. kubectl get pods -n istio-system
It feels a bit silly typing that one out, but if you’re new, it’s good to know that Istio usually installs its control plane components in the istio-system namespace. The key component in Istio 1.6 and above is istiod . Here’s an example output.
$ kubectl get pods -n istio-system
NAME READY STATUS RESTARTS AGE
grafana-64986f9974-bmb28 1/1 Running 0 13d
istio-egressgateway-5f9595d5d-gtlwr 1/1 Running 0 13d
istio-ingressgateway-555fd75c88-f6jc8 1/1 Running 0…
