Minikube

    • Administrative privileges are required to run minikube.

    • To enable the (SDS) for your mesh, you must add extra configurations to your Kubernetes deployment. Refer to the for the most up-to-date flags.

    Installation steps

    1. Install the latest version of minikube and a .

    2. Start minikube with 16384 MB of memory and 4 . 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:

      1. $ 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 is sufficent to run Istio and bookinfo.

      • image pull failures
      • healthcheck timeout failures
      • kubectl failures on the host
      • complete lock-up of the virtual machine
      • host NMI watchdog reboots

      One effective way to monitor memory usage in minikube is to ssh into the minikube virtual machine and from that prompt run the top command:

      1. $ top

      This shows 12.4GiB used of an available 15.7 GiB RAM within the virtual machine. This data was generated with the VMWare Fusion hypervisor on a Macbook Pro 13” with 16GiB RAM running Istio 1.2 with bookinfo installed.

    3. (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: