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Version: 1.6.x

Revisioned to Revisioned

Alpha Feature

Control plane upgrades are controlled by Istio Isolation Boundaries, which is an Alpha feature and is not recommended for production usage.

Before you continue, make sure you are familiar with Istio Isolation Boundaries feature.

note

Revisioned to revisioned control plane upgrades can be carried out within a single isolation boundary.

Before you upgrade​

Once the Istio isolation boundary feature is enabled, boundaries can be leveraged to maintain service discovery isolation, and aid in upgrades of the Istio control plane is inside the same boundary. For a given ControlPlane CR or Helm values that consists of a single isolation boundary:

spec:
  ...
  components:
    xcp:
      isolationBoundaries:
      - name: global
        revisions:
        - name: stable
          istio:
            tsbVersion: 1.6.0

You will upgrade all workloads in the stable revision to use tsbVersion: 1.6.1.

Control plane upgrading strategy

TSB supports both - In-Place and Canary control plane upgrades for revisioned to revisioned upgrades.

Control plane In-Place upgrades​

For in-place upgrade, you can directly update the tsbVersion field - leaving the revision name intact.

spec:
  ...
  components:
    xcp:
      isolationBoundaries:
      - name: global
        revisions:
        - name: stable
          istio:
            tsbVersion: 1.6.1

This would re-deploy the Istio control plane components with the TSB Istio release corresponding to tsbVersion: 1.6.1. This state will be reconciled by the xcp-operator-edge operator in istio-system namespace.

Gateway upgrade​

By default, gateways will be upgraded automatically to use latest tsbVersion. See Gateway upgrades for more details on gateway upgrade behavior.

Application upgrade​

Since the revision name does not change, no updates are required in the workload namespaces (workload-ns in this example). However you still need to restart the application workloads. A rolling update is preferred to avoid traffic disruptions.

kubectl rollout restart deployment -n workload-ns

VM workload upgrade​

To upgrade VM workload, download latest Istio sidecar from your onboarding plane using revisioned link then reinstall Istio sidecar on the VM.

Then restart onboarding-agent running in the VM.

Control plane Canary upgrades​

For canary upgrade, you can add another revision with name 1-6-1 that has the upgraded tsbVersion value.

spec:
  ...
  components:
    xcp:
      isolationBoundaries:
      - name: global
        revisions:
        - name: stable
          istio:
            tsbVersion: 1.6.0
        - name: 1-6-1
          istio:
            tsbVersion: 1.6.1

This would deploy another istio control plane (revision 1-6-1) with the TSB Istio release corresponding to tsbVersion: 1.6.1. This state will be reconciled by the xcp-operator-edge operator in istio-system namespace. You can check istio-operator and istiod deployment to verify. 

kubectl get deployment -n istio-system | grep istio-operator
# Output
istio-operator-stable         1/1     1            1           15h
istio-operator-1-6-1          1/1     1            1            2m
kubectl get deployment -n istio-system | grep istiod
# Output
istiod-stable          1/1     1            1           15h
istiod-1-6-1           1/1     1            1            2m

Note that there is a old revisioned control plane (stable) still deployed which manages existing sidecars and gateways.

Gateway upgrade​

To upgrade the Gateways, update the spec.revision in the Ingress/Egress/Tier1Gateway resource. This will reconcile the existing gateway pods to connect to the new revisioned Istio control plane. TSB by default configures the Gateway install resources with a RollingUpdate strategy that ensures zero downtime.

You can also update spec.revision by patching gateway CR.

kubectl patch ingressgateway.install <name> -n <namespace> --type=json --patch '[{"op": "replace","path": "/spec/revision","value": "1-6-1"}]'; \

Application upgrade​

To upgrade sidecars, replace istio.io/rev=stable workload namespace label and apply the new revision. 

kubectl label namespace workload-ns istio.io/rev=1-6-1 --overwrite=true

Then restart the application workloads. A rolling update is preferred to avoid traffic disruptions.

kubectl rollout restart deployment -n workload-ns

VM workload upgrade​

To upgrade VM workload, download latest Istio sidecar from your onboarding plane using revisioned link then reinstall Istio sidecar on the VM.

Update revision value in onboarding-agent configuration then restart onboarding-agent.

Post-upgrade cleanup​

A revision that is no longer in use can either be removed or marked "disabled" in the ControlPlane CR as mentioned below. Marking it disabled helps in enabling the revision back at any point in time.

spec:
  ...
  components:
    xcp:
      isolationBoundaries:
      - name: global
        revisions:
        - name: stable
          istio:
            tsbVersion: 1.6.0
          disable: true
        - name: 1-6-1
          istio:
            tsbVersion: 1.6.1
Stale Istio control plane components

After disabling/removing the revision under isolation boundaries, a few stale components might remain. For instance, IstioOperator resource, istio-operator (revisioned) deployment or istiod (revisioned) deployment. This happens due to a race condition in removing the IstioOperator resource and istio-operator deployment. In that case, such Istio components can be removed like regular kubernetes objects using

kubectl delete iop xcp-iop-stable -n istio-system
kubectl delete deployment istio-operator-stable -n istio-system
kubectl delete configmap istio-sidecar-injector-stable -n istio-system
kubectl delete deployment istiod-stable -n istio-system

Rollback from revisioned to revisioned​

This workflow is similar to upgrading from revisioned to revisioned control plane. You need to update your workloads to use old revision.