Tutorial: Blue/Green Deployments with Kubernetes and Istio

Istio is a service mesh designed to make communication among microservices reliable, transparent, and secure. Istio intercepts the external and internal traffic targeting the services deployed in container platforms such as Kubernetes.

Though Istio is capable of many things including secure service-to-service communication, automated logging of metrics, enforcing a policy for access controls, rate limits, and quotas, we will focus exclusively on the traffic management features.

Istio lets DevOps teams create rules to intelligently route the traffic to internal services. It is extremely simple to configure service-level properties like circuit breakers, timeouts, and retries, to set up a variety of deployment patterns including blue/green deployments and canary rollouts.

The objective of this tutorial is to help you understand how to configure blue/green deployment of microservices running in Kubernetes with Istio. You don’t need to have any prerequisites to explore this scenario except a basic idea of deploying pods and services in Kubernetes. We will configure everything from Minikube to Istio to the sample application.

Read the entire article at The New Stack

Janakiram MSV is an analyst, advisor, and architect. Follow him on Twitter,  Facebook and LinkedIn.