So far, in this section of this book, we have learned about control and data plane concepts. We then deployed the demo application for Istio in our Kubernetes environment. In this chapter, we will go through the three installation methods of Istio and enable the demo application to use Istio through automatic sidecar injection. We will then show both the automatic and manual ways of injecting a sidecar in to each microservice for the Bookinfo demo application. 

The package installation procedure in Kubernetes is going through a transformation—starting with Helm (the client) and Tiller (the server) and then the operator-based install. At the time of writing, the Istio operator based-install is evolving. We will focus on helm install and you will learn about the pre-packaged Istio profile-based installation.   

In a nutshell, we will be carrying out the following in this chapter:

• Performing pre-installation tasks
• Installing Istio using three different methods
• Installing a load balancer
• Enabling Istio
• Setting up horizontal pod scaling