Minikube

Follow these instructions to prepare minikube for Istio installation with sufficient resources to run Istio and some basic applications.

Prerequisites

• Administrative privileges are required to run minikube.

• To enable the Secret Discovery Service (SDS) for your mesh, you must add extra configurations to your Kubernetes deployment. Refer to the api-server reference docs for the most up-to-date flags.

Installation steps

1. Install the latest version of minikube and a minikube hypervisor driver.

2. If you’re not using the default driver, set your minikube hypervisor driver.

   For example, if you installed the KVM hypervisor, set the driver within the minikube configuration using the following command:

   $ minikube config set driver kvm2
   

3. Start minikube with 16384 MB of memory and 4 CPUs. This example uses Kubernetes version 1.20.2. You can change the version to any Kubernetes version supported by Istio by altering the --kubernetes-version value:

   $ minikube start --memory=16384 --cpus=4 --kubernetes-version=v1.20.2
   

   Depending on the hypervisor you use and the platform on which the hypervisor is run, minimum memory requirements vary. 16384 MB is sufficent to run Istio and bookinfo.

4. (Optional, recommended) If you want minikube to provide a load balancer for use by Istio, you can use the minikube tunnel feature. Run this command in a different terminal, because the minikube tunnel feature will block your terminal to output diagnostic information about the network:

   $ minikube tunnel