Canaries with Istio and Argo Rollouts

Deploying new versions of software can lead to various problems, affecting the experience of your customers, but also could lead to lost sales and annoyed customers when something goes wrong.

To avoid such situations, there are various deployment strategies that help to reduce the risk of failure. Rolling updates are a default mechanism in Kubernetes, that spin up new replicas of pods and remove the old ones afterward. Blue-Green deployments can be configured to deploy the new version upfront, validate and shift traffic in the end. Besides other mechanisms and variations, Canary deployments can be configured to gradually shift traffic from one version of the deployed application to the next.

While rolling updates are mechanisms shipped with Kubernetes, Blue-Green and Canary Deployments depend on ecosystem tools to work.

In this lab, you will configure a canary deployment using Istio as a Service Mesh and Argo Rollouts to steer the traffic shifting.

After this Lab you will be able to:

• Install Argo Rollouts and Istio
• Configure Istio Virtual Services
• Configure mTLS and per Endpoint Authorization in Istio
• Gradually update a workload using Argo Rollouts

Finally, you will get a good overview about Service Meshes and Progressive Delivery which will be a good starting point if you want to dive deeper.