Some time ago, Arun Gupta asked about the steps to be able to use Kiali with Istio on Amazon EKS. We exchanged a few emails, but ultimately I did not succeed (actually I did, but did not know it until today :-)

Screenshot of Kiali v0.10 running on Amazon EKS

Meanwhile Arun tweeted that he had success, but I still did not know the missing piece. So I poked around and found also his example repo, that shows how to install Istio on EKS. I followed the steps, updating it on the go to Istio 1.0.5 and by enabling Kiali.

Still I did not see Kiali. Poking around some more led me to kubectl port-forward (something I normally don’t use, so I am not accustomed to it and thus missed it before):

$ kubectl -n istio-system port-forward svc/kiali 20001:20001 &

This way port 20001 of the Kiali service / pod is forwarded to localhost:20001 and we can easily access Kiali on http://localhost:20001/

I have opened a Pull-Request on Arun’s repo to include my findings. Update Jan14th: this has been merged now.

Following latest Kiali

If you want to follow the latest Kiali development you can edit the deployment config to pull in the :latest tag of the image

kubectl edit deployment/kiali -n istio-system

Excerpt from the deployment descriptor

Change v0.10 to latest and also the policy from IfNotPresent to Always. The latter is not recommended for production but then you also don’t want to follow the development there :-) To get a new version just delete the Kiali pod and Kubernetes will pull the latest and greatest.

kubectl delete pod -l app=kiali -n istio-system

After the Kiali application has been refreshed, you need to restart the port-forwarding, as it is tied to the pod and the old Kiali pod has gone.

P.S.:

My colleague Mazz told me that this is also mentioned in the Istio docs now. On top the next 1.0.x version of Istio will also pull in a much newer version of Kiali (most likely v0.12).

Thanks to my colleague Joel for providing me with a simpler port-forward command than I originally had in the post