Testing Istio’s Virtual Machine integration locally with Calico
Channel: Istio
Date: 2022-05-15

Presented by Nina Polshakova at IstioCon 2022.

Istio provides native Virtual Machine integration for legacy applications which requires IP connectivity to the East/West gateway deployed in the mesh, and optionally connectivity to the pod networking for enhanced performance.

In production deployments, the communication between Kubernetes nodes and non-Kubernetes nodes are often handled with sophisticated techniques like VPC or VPN, but on a developer machine your Kubernetes nodes may be running in a simulated environment such as minikube, k3s or kind. It can be tricky to test this locally on a developer setup. How can you test calls from a Kubernetes service locally to and from a service on a VM without using LoadBalancer type Kubernetes services - using only Cluster-IP or Pod-IP?

In this session, I will talk about challenges you may face in a developer setup and how using the Calico Networking Plugin enables you to develop VM integrated meshes without LoadBalancer services in both single network and multi network environments.