Observability with service mesh in Kubernetes - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Observability with Service Mesh in Kubernetes

📖 Scenario: You are managing a Kubernetes cluster running multiple microservices. To improve monitoring and troubleshooting, you want to enable observability using a service mesh.This project guides you through setting up a simple service mesh configuration to collect telemetry data.

🎯 Goal: Set up a basic service mesh observability configuration in Kubernetes by creating a namespace, enabling automatic sidecar injection, labeling the namespace, and verifying the injected sidecar container.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a Kubernetes namespace called observability-demo

Label the namespace with istio-injection=enabled to enable automatic sidecar injection

Deploy a sample pod in the observability-demo namespace

Verify that the pod has the Istio sidecar container injected

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Service meshes like Istio help teams monitor and control microservices traffic in Kubernetes clusters, improving reliability and troubleshooting.

💼 Career

Understanding service mesh observability is valuable for DevOps engineers and SREs managing cloud-native applications.

1

Create the Kubernetes namespace

Create a Kubernetes namespace called observability-demo using the kubectl command.

Kubernetes

# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use kubectl create namespace observability-demo to create the namespace.

2

Label the namespace for automatic sidecar injection

Label the observability-demo namespace with istio-injection=enabled using kubectl label namespace observability-demo istio-injection=enabled.

Kubernetes

kubectl create namespace observability-demo
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use kubectl label namespace observability-demo istio-injection=enabled to enable sidecar injection.

3

Deploy a sample pod in the labeled namespace

Deploy a pod named sample-app in the observability-demo namespace using the nginx image with the command kubectl run sample-app --image=nginx --namespace=observability-demo.

Kubernetes

kubectl create namespace observability-demo
kubectl label namespace observability-demo istio-injection=enabled
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use kubectl run sample-app --image=nginx --namespace=observability-demo to deploy the pod.

4

Verify the Istio sidecar injection

Use kubectl get pods -n observability-demo to get the pod name, then run kubectl describe pod sample-app -n observability-demo and check for the presence of the istio-proxy container in the pod description.

Kubernetes

kubectl create namespace observability-demo
kubectl label namespace observability-demo istio-injection=enabled
kubectl run sample-app --image=nginx --namespace=observability-demo
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Look for istio-proxy in the output of kubectl describe pod sample-app -n observability-demo.