Each pod has one application container and one network proxy container, injected by Isito. You’ll see 2/2 in the READY column for all the pods, which is the number of running containers. Exit out of the watch command with Ctrl-C. When all the pods have a status of Running, the app is good to go. The Istio demo application manifest runs all the features of Istio and it works in the same way on Docker Desktop or on a multi-node Kubernetes cluster in the cloud: You can deploy it in different ways (typically using the Istioctl command line, or with the Meshery tool if you’re comparing different service meshes), but the simplest is with kubectl. Istio runs as a Kubernetes application itself. Under the Resources tab increase the memory slider to at least 6GB - increasing CPU cores to at least 2 would be good too: Click on the Docker whale icon in the taskbar on Windows or the menu bar on Mac and click Settings. Istio runs in containers and you’ll need to give Docker Desktop some extra memory so it can run everything. You’ll need Docker Desktop installed with Kubernetes running - you can follow the steps from the lab Getting Started with Kubernetes on Docker Desktop. You’ll gain experience of some of the core features of Istio: using traffic management for canary deployments, applying encryption in transit with service authorization, and monitoring communication.
In this lab you’ll learn how to deploy the demo installation of Istio on Docker Desktop and run a simple demo app. It’s an architecture which works really well for distributed applications running in containers on Kubernetes, and you can try it out using Docker Desktop.
Istio is a service mesh - a software component which manages the network communication for your applications.