Kiali releases 1.58 to 1.65: Features update
Hello community. Five months have passed since my last post. During this time the Kiali project has released seven more versions. The features of version v1.62 are included in the demo of release v1.63.
As usual, all live presentations are recorded and posted on Kiali channel:
Kiali v1.58 updates — about 14 mins long
Kiali v1.59 updates — about 13 mins long
Kiali v1.60 updates — about 11 mins long
Kiali v1.61 updates — about 25 mins long
Kiali v1.63 updates — about 22 mins long
Kiali v1.64 updates — about 8 mins long
Kiali v1.65 updates — about 5 mins long
And here we have listed the highlighted improvements in Kiali for recent releases:
Control Plane card improvements in Overview Page
A new icon is added on Control Plane card which is showing the status of Istio components, more details about not running Istio components can be found on tooltip of that icon.
Also a new information is added on Control Plane card which shows the Min TLS Version configured in Istio. The tooltip of the TLS icon will show more detailed information about the TLS certificate.
Istio’s recommended upgrade method is the “Canary upgrade”. So information is added into the Control Plane card showing the percentage of namespaces upgraded to the canary version of Istio.
Deployments — Remote istiod
Kiali connects to istiod through port-forwarding. For situations when Kiali is not running on the same cluster with istiod, or does not have access to it, a new option is added to connect to istiod by specifying the remote istiod URL. It allows Kiali to support more deployment models.
Kiali working with no Istiod access
For the scenarios when istiod is not accessible to Kiali or istiod does not exist, Kiali should still be able to run. For this purpose a new configuration option istio_api_enabled is added, which is by default true, but when it is set to false, Kiali will be functional and available to users but with some restrictions:
- No control Plane metrics
- No sidecar information in workloads view
- Namespaces list is obtained directly from Kube API, Istio cache won’t be used
- Istio Configurations in read mode
- Istio Registry services not available
Improved Gateway API Support
More support of K8s Gateway API is added to Kiali. It includes K8s Gateway object creation via Istio config wizard, K8s Gateway API Routing Creation in Service’s Traffic wizard, as well as showing API Gateway in Graphs.
K8s Gatway API Objects, such as K8sGateway and K8sHTTPRoute now got validations and references to each other.
Edit annotations for workloads and services
Istio can be configured for an individual resource using annotations. As an example, enabling/disabling sidecar injection can be accomplished by adding the sidecar.istio.io/inject annotation to a pod's metadata. There are many different configuration options available as annotations and the schema for these varies depending on the option. Some are simple key: value such as sidecar injection: sidecar.istio.io/inject: "true" and some are more complex values: proxy.istio.io/config: '{"proxyMetadata": {"ISTIO_META_DNS_CAPTURE": "true"}}'.
A new wizard is added to the Actions for Workload and Service detail pages. It allows editing the existing annotations, or adding new ones.
Improved “View Debug Info” in manifest
From the ? dropdown, there is a View Debug Info option. It is improved to use more detailed information which can be used for logging bugs or for debug perspectives.
Wrap up
These are 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 future 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!
