Rancher Release v2.3.0-alpha5 - Preview of Istio

Announcements
1

Release v2.3.0-alpha5

Important

With this release, we are announcing the preview of Istio in Rancher.

Our users count upon us to make managing and operating Kubernetes (and the related tools and technologies) easy and with no lock-in to a specific cloud vendor. With Istio, we do the same.
In this preview, we have provided users with a simple UI to enable Istio (located under the Tools menu in a cluster). Default configurations are provided but can be changed as required.

As always, we truly value our users’ feedback and input on the previews and strive to incorporate as much of it as possible prior to a GA release. Thank you all for your support!

Major Features and Enhancements

  • Support for Istio [#19087] - With Rancher 2.3.0 Preview 2, users can install and configure Istio and enable an option to allow Rancher to automatically inject the Envoy sidecar on all workloads in a given namespace. The preview also includes Kiali, Jaeger, Prometheus and Grafana for telemetry visualization, tracing and monitoring and observability.

Please refer to our 2.x docs pages for more information on how to configure Istio and use Istio in Rancher.

Major known issues and limitations

  1. Istio will not work on Windows clusters [#20951]
  2. Istio capability comes with its own Prometheus and Grafana instances
  3. There is no UI for creating Virtual Services, Deployment Rules, etc. Users have to create and apply their own YAMLs
  4. There may be conflicts with scheduling Istio resources if monitoring is deployed or if there aren’t enough resources on workers due to scheduling [#20957, #20702]

Versions

NOTE - Image Name Changes: Please note that as of v2.0.0, our images will be rancher/rancher and rancher/rancher-agent. If you are using v1.6, please continue to use rancher/server and rancher/agent.

Images

  • rancher/rancher:v2.3.0-alpha5
  • rancher/rancher-agent:v2.3.0-alpha5

NOTE - We’ve introduced a new helm repository to facilitate the deployment of alpha releases. For more details, see our installation documentation.

Tools

Kubernetes