Definitions : Minishift, Service Mesh and Istio.

Minishift — a tool that helps us to run OpenShift locally by running a single-node OpenShift Cluster inside a VM.

Service Mesh — The network of microservices which require a dedicated infrastructure layer that provides loadbalancing, traffic management, routing, observability such as monitoring, logging, metrics, tracing, security policies, authentication and protection against intrusion and DDoS attacks. Basically, we need service mesh if we’re building cloud native microservice applications. The general concepts of service mesh is comprised of:

Control Plane: Linkerd, NGINX, Envoy, Traefik

Data Plane: Istio, Nelson, SmartStack

Istio — An open platform to connect, manage and secure microservices. By default, Istio’s data plane is composed of a set of intelligent proxies (Envoy) deployed as sidecars. Istio can integrate with Linkerd and NGINX as a replacement of Envoy. Istio can be deployed in various environments such as:

Kubernetes

Nomad & Consul

Eureka

Cloud Foundry

Apache Mesos

Image Courtesy of Istio

Now, we’re going to setup Minishift + Istio on MacOS Sierra for local development, testing and learning purposes.

Prerequisites:

1 — Homebrew

2 — Virtual Box

Install Minishift with Homebrew.