Kiali releases 1.44 and 1.45: Features update
Hello community. Almost two months have passed since my last post. During this time the Kiali project has released two more versions.
As usual, all live presentations are recorded and posted on Kiali channel:
Kiali v1.44 updates — about 19 mins long
Kiali v1.45 updates — about 21 mins long
And here we have listed the highlighted improvements in Kiali for recent releases:
Graph: Usability Improvements
Variety of changes has been made on the graph, such as zoom-aware labeling, namespace box by default, better toolbar, configurable label font and etc…
Detailed information about graph improvements can be found in the demo recording.
Graph: improve Pod to Pod scenarios
In a case of direct pod to pod communication use cases, Kiali was showing those communications in the graph via intermediate PassthroughCluster nodes, through which everything is coming in and going out.
This was causing complications in graph. Now the Kiali graph shows direct edge between pods. And only in cases of communications outside of the mesh, the PassthroughCluster node is shown as an edge.
Graph: Node rank in summary panel
Node rank is now shown in the summary graph panel when the node is selected. Node ranking can be enabled via the graph Display menu.
Overview: Preview mode in Traffic Policies actions
While creating Traffic Policies for namespaces in Overview page, it is now possible to preview the proposed configs (Sidecars and AuthorizationPolicies), which are available to be copied or downloaded as a single YAML file.
Istio Registry: improve Egress scenarios
Istio Registry is used as a source for Services. External Services / Service Entries have better visibility in Service List/Details. Improved the Egress scenarios and Istio resources involved.
Demos: new additions and updates
A Topology generator demo application is added. Improvements in the Federation demo application. They are detailed in the demo recording.
Validations: VirtualService subsets
In Virtual services the subset destination is not mandatory. You might be sending traffic to different services without specifying any subset (labeling).
Now a validation is added to check the duplications of subsets using the same host in other Virtual Services and show a warning.
Performance: improve Jaeger integration
Jaeger GRPC connections were not properly reused in Kiali, now it is fixed.
Configuration: allow to personalize istiod port
Kiali fetches information from the control plane to get information about proxy status. Now the configuration of the istiod listening port can be personalized for users.
Operator updates
Custom labels on routes to support router sharding/multi-tenants. Define explicit default pod resource limits for operator and server.
Wrap up
These were all the main features I wanted to highlight in this post. Feel free to share your thoughts about what type of information you want to see in next posts. And as always, we appreciate any ideas and feedback about Kiali features.
Remember that Kiali is OpenSource and you can contribute to build a better project! It would be nice if you also contribute with written content in Kiali’s Medium publication!
