Introducing GetIstio: the easiest way to get Istio

by Varun Talwar on Feb 10, 2021 / 3 min read

Istio is one of the most popular and fast growing open-source projects in the cloud-native world; while this growth speaks volumes about the value users get from Istio, its rapid release cadence can also be a challenge for users who may be managing several different versions of Istio clusters at the same time and manually configuring CA certificates for cloud platforms.

Overview

We launched a new open-source project called GetIstio today, offering users the easiest way to install and upgrade Istio. GetIstio provides a vetted, upstream distribution of Istio – a hardened image of Istio with continued support that is simpler to install, manage, and upgrade. It will have integrations with cloud native and popular on-prem certificate managers (e.g., AWS ACM, Venafi, etc). This launch includes:

GetIstio CLI, the easiest way to install, operate, and upgrade Istio. GetIstio provides a safe, vetted, upstream Istio distro, tested against AKS, EKS, and GKE.
A free, online course on Istio Fundamentals, that is available now at Tetrate Academy.
A new community to bring together Istio and Envoy users and technology partners.

GetIstio CLI

GetIstio is an integration and lifecycle management CLI tool that ensures the use of supported and vetted versions of Istio. Enterprises require the ability to control Istio versioning, support multiple versions of Istio, easily move between the versions, integrate with cloud providers’ certification systems, and centralize config management and validation. The GetIstio CLI tool supports these enterprise-level requirements as it:

enforces fetching certified versions of Istio and enables only compatible versions of Istio installation
allows seamlessly switching between multiple istioctl versions
Includes a FIPS-compliant flavor
delivers Istio configuration validations platform based by integrating validation libraries from multiple sources
uses a number of cloud provider certificate management systems to create Istio CA certs that are used for signing Service-Mesh managed workloads, and
provides multiple additional integration points with cloud providers

Quick start

The command below obtains a shell script that downloads and installs the GetIstio binary that corresponds to the OS distribution detected by the script (currently macOS and Linux are supported). Additionally, the most recent supported version of Istio is downloaded. Also, the script adds the GetIstio location to the PATH variable (re-login is required to get PATH populated)

 curl -sL https://istio.tetratelabs.io/getmesh/install.sh | bash

The following video shows the basic use of the GetIstio command line tool.

Get involved

As part of GetIstio we are also launching a new community for developers, end users and technology partners of Istio, Envoy, and service mesh. Community is open to all. The GetIstio.io website also includes practical tutorials for using Istio.

If you want to take your learning to the next level, we have also prepared a free Learn Istio Fundamentals course as part of Tetrate Academy. It is a self-paced course that has 8 modules with theoretical lessons where we explain the theory and concepts, practical lessons which consist of labs, and quizzes so you can check your knowledge. Join our weekly meetings, file issues, or ask questions in Slack. No contribution is too small and your opinions and contributions matter!

GetIstio Subscription

Tetrate provides commercial support for GetIstio for direct access to Istio experts, priority bug fixes and 24/7 support. More details here.