In this chapter, we will work with Istio. I chose to use Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) in this chapter because Istio can be enabled on GKE as an add-on and doesn't require you to install it. This has the following two benefits:
- It saves time on installation
- It demonstrates that Delinkcious can run in the cloud and not just locally
To install Istio, you simply have to enable it in the GKE console and select an mTLS mode, which is the mutual authentication between services. I chose permissive, which means that the internal communication inside the cluster is not encrypted by default, and the services will accept both encrypted and non-encrypted connections. You can override it per service. For production clusters, I recommend using the strict mTLS mode, where all connections must be encrypted:
Istio gets installed in its own istio-system namespace...