Plan an installation
This page provides information to help you plan a new installation of in-cluster Cloud Service Mesh for Kubernetes workloads off Google Cloud.
Customize the control plane
The features that Cloud Service Mesh supports differ between platforms. We recommend
that you review the Supported features to
learn which features are supported on your platform. Some features are enabled
by default, and others you can optionally enable by creating an IstioOperator
overlay file. When you run asmcli install, you can customize the control plane
by specifying the --custom_overlay
option with the overlay file. As a best practice, we recommend that you save
the overlay files in your version control system.
The
asmcli directory
in GitHub contains many overlay files. These files contain common customizations
to the default configuration. You can use these files as they are, or you can
make additional changes to them as needed. Some of the files are required to
enable optional Cloud Service Mesh features.
The anthos-service-mesh package is downloaded when you run asmcli to
validate your project and cluster.
When you install Cloud Service Mesh using asmcli install, you
can specify one or more overlay files with the --option or --custom_overlay.
If you don't need to make any changes to the files in the anthos-service-mesh
repository, you can use --option, and the script fetches the file from GitHub
for you. Otherwise, you can make changes to the overlay file, and then use the
--custom_overlay option to pass it to the asmcli.
Choose a Certificate Authority
Depending on your use case and platform, you can choose one of the following as the certificate authority (CA) for issuing mutual TLS (mTLS) certificates:
This section provides high-level information about each of these CA options and their use cases.
Mesh CA
Unless you require a custom CA, we recommend that you use Cloud Service Mesh certificate authority for the following reasons:
- Cloud Service Mesh certificate authority is a highly reliable and scalable service that is optimized for dynamically scaled workloads.
- With Cloud Service Mesh certificate authority, Google manages the security and availability of the CA backend.
- Cloud Service Mesh certificate authority lets you rely on a single root of trust across clusters.
Certificates from Mesh CA include the following data about your application's services:
- The Google Cloud project ID
- The GKE namespace
- The GKE service account name
CA Service
In addition to Cloud Service Mesh certificate authority, you can configure Cloud Service Mesh to use Certificate Authority Service. This guide provides you an opportunity to integrate with CA Service, which is recommended for the following use cases:
- If you need different certificate authorities to sign workload certificates on different clusters.
- If you need to back your signing keys in a managed HSM.
- If you are in a highly regulated industry and are subject to compliance.
- If you want to chain up your Cloud Service Mesh CA to a custom enterprise root certificate to sign workload certificates.
The cost of Cloud Service Mesh certificate authority is included in the Cloud Service Mesh pricing. The CA Service isn't included in the base Cloud Service Mesh price and is charged separately. Additionally, CA Service comes with an explicit SLA, but the Cloud Service Mesh certificate authority does not.
Istio CA
We recommend that you use Istio CA if you meet the following criteria:
- Your mesh already uses Istio CA and you do not require the benefits enabled by Cloud Service Mesh certificate authority or CA Service.
- You require a custom root CA.
- You have off-Google Cloud workloads where a Google Cloud-managed CA service is not acceptable.
Prepare gateway configuration
Cloud Service Mesh gives you the option to deploy and manage gateways as part of your service mesh. A gateway describes a load balancer operating at the edge of the mesh receiving incoming or outgoing HTTP/TCP connections. Gateways are Envoy proxies that provide you with fine-grained control over traffic entering and leaving the mesh.
asmcli doesn't install the istio-ingressgateway. We recommend that you
deploy and manage the control plane and gateways separately. For more
information, see Installing and upgrading gateways.