Upgrading Istio

This page describes how to upgrade an existing Istio deployment (including both control plane and sidecar proxy) to a new release of Istio. The upgrade process could involve new binaries as well as other changes like configuration and API schemas. The upgrade process may involve some service downtime. To minimize downtime, please ensure your Istio control plane components and your applications are highly available with multiple replicas.

In the following steps, we assume that the Istio components are installed and upgraded in the istio-system namespace.

Control plane upgrade

The Istio control plane components include: Citadel, Ingress gateway, Egress gateway, Pilot, Policy, Telemetry and Sidecar injector. We can use Kubernetes’ rolling update mechanism to upgrade the control plane components.

First, generate the desired Istio control plane yaml file, e.g.

$ helm template --namespace istio-system --set global.proxy.image=proxy \
  --values @install/kubernetes/helm/istio/values-istio.yaml@ \
  @install/kubernetes/helm/istio@ >> install/kubernetes/istio.yaml

or

$ helm template --namespace istio-system --set global.proxy.image=proxy \
  --values @install/kubernetes/helm/istio/values-istio-auth.yaml@ \
  @install/kubernetes/helm/istio@ >> install/kubernetes/istio-auth.yaml

If using Kubernetes versions prior to 1.9, you should add --set sidecarInjectorWebhook.enabled=false.

Second, simply apply the new version of the desired Istio control plane yaml file directly, e.g.

$ kubectl apply -f @install/kubernetes/istio.yaml@

or

$ kubectl apply -f @install/kubernetes/istio-auth.yaml@

The rolling update process will upgrade all deployments and configmaps to the new version. After this process finishes, your Istio control plane should be updated to the new version. Your existing application should continue to work without any change, using the Envoy v1 proxy and the v1alpha1 route rules. If there is any critical issue with the new control plane, you can rollback the changes by applying the yaml files from the old version.

Sidecar upgrade

After the control plane upgrade, the applications already running Istio will still be using an older sidecar. To upgrade the sidecar, you will need to re-inject it.

If you're using automatic sidecar injection, you can upgrade the sidecar by doing a rolling update for all the pods, so that the new version of the sidecar will be automatically re-injected. There are some tricks to reload all pods. E.g. There is a bash script which triggers the rolling update by patching the grace termination period.

If you're using manual injection, you can upgrade the sidecar by executing:

$ kubectl replace -f <(istioctl kube-inject -f $ORIGINAL_DEPLOYMENT_YAML)

If the sidecar was previously injected with some customized inject config files, you will need to change the version tag in the config files to the new version and re-inject the sidecar as follows:

$ kubectl replace -f <(istioctl kube-inject \
     --injectConfigFile inject-config.yaml \
     --filename $ORIGINAL_DEPLOYMENT_YAML)

Migrating to the new networking APIs

Once you've upgraded the control plane and sidecar, you can gradually update your deployment to use the new Envoy sidecar. You can do this by using one of the options below:

  • Add the following to your pod annotation for your deployment:

    kind: Deployment
...
spec:
  template:
    metadata:
      annotations:
        sidecar.istio.io/proxyImage: docker.io/istio/proxyv2:0.8.0

    Then replace your deployment with your updated application yaml file:

    $ kubectl replace -f $UPDATED_DEPLOYMENT_YAML

or

  • Use an injectConfigFile that has docker.io/istio/proxyv2:0.8.0 as the proxy image. If you don't have an injectConfigFile, you can generate one. injectConfigFile is recommended if you need to add the sidecar.istio.io/proxyImage annotations in multiple deployment definitions.

    $ kubectl replace -f <(istioctl kube-inject --injectConfigFile inject-config.yaml -f $ORIGINAL_DEPLOYMENT_YAML)

Next, use istioctl experimental convert-networking-config to convert your existing ingress or route rules:

  1. If your yaml file contains more than the ingress definition such as deployment or service definition, move the ingress definition out to a separate yaml file for the istioctl experimental convert-networking-config tool to process.

  2. Execute the following to generate the new network config file, where replacing FILE*.yaml with your ingress file or deprecated route rule files. *Tip: Make sure to feed all the files using -f for one or more deployments.*

    $ istioctl experimental convert-networking-config -f FILE1.yaml -f FILE2.yaml -f FILE3.yaml > UPDATED_NETWORK_CONFIG.yaml

  3. Edit UPDATED_NETWORK_CONFIG.yaml to update all namespace references to your desired namespace. There is a known issue with the convert-networking-config tool where the istio-system namespace is used incorrectly. Further, ensure the hosts value is correct.

  4. Deploy the updated network config file.

    $ kubectl replace -f UPDATED_NETWORK_CONFIG.yaml

When all your applications have been migrated and tested, you can repeat the Istio upgrade process, removing the --set global.proxy.image=proxy option. This will set the default proxy to docker.io/istio/proxyv2 for all sidecars injected in the future.

Migrating per-service mutual TLS enablement via annotations to authentication policy

If you use service annotations to override global mutual TLS enablement for a service, you need to replace it with authentication policy and destination rules.

For example, if you install Istio with mutual TLS enabled, and disable it for service foo using a service annotation like below:

kind: Service
metadata:
  name: foo
  namespace: bar
  annotations:
    auth.istio.io/8000: NONE

You need to replace this with this authentication policy and destination rule (deleting the old annotation is optional)

apiVersion: "authentication.istio.io/v1alpha1"
kind: "Policy"
metadata:
  name: "disable-mTLS-foo"
  namespace: bar
spec:
  targets:
  - name: foo
    ports:
    - number: 8000
  peers:
---
apiVersion: "networking.istio.io/v1alpha3"
kind: "DestinationRule"
metadata:
  name: "disable-mTLS-foo"
  namespace: "bar"
spec:
  host: "foo"
  trafficPolicy:
    tls:
      mode: ISTIO_MUTUAL
    portLevelSettings:
    - port:
        number: 8000
      tls:
        mode: DISABLE

If you already have destination rules for foo, you must edit that rule instead of creating a new one. When create a new destination rule, make sure to include other settings, i.e load balancer, connection pool and outlier detection if necessary. Finally, If foo doesn't have sidecar, you can skip authentication policy, but still need to add destination rule.

If 8000 is the only port that service foo provides (or you want to disable mutual TLS for all ports), the policies can be simplified as:

apiVersion: "authentication.istio.io/v1alpha1"
kind: "Policy"
metadata:
  name: "disable-mTLS-foo"
    namespace: bar
  spec:
    targets:
    - name: foo
    peers:
---
apiVersion: "networking.istio.io/v1alpha3"
kind: "DestinationRule"
metadata:
  name: "disable-mTLS-foo"
  namespace: "bar"
spec:
  host: "foo"
trafficPolicy:
  tls:
    mode: DISABLE

Migrating mtls_excluded_services config to destination rules

If you installed Istio with mutual TLS enabled, and used mesh config mtls_excluded_services to disable mutual TLS when connecting to these services (e.g kubernetes API server), you need to replace this by adding a destination rule. For example:

apiVersion: networking.istio.io/v1alpha3
kind: DestinationRule
metadata:
  name: "kubernetes-master"
  namespace: "default"
spec:
  host: "kubernetes.default.svc.cluster.local"
  trafficPolicy:
    tls:
      mode: DISABLE


Istio Multicluster