Requirements for Pods and Services

To be a part of the service mesh, pods and services in a Kubernetes cluster must satisfy the following requirements:

• Named ports: Service ports must be named. The port names must be of the form <protocol>[-<suffix>] with http, http2, grpc, mongo, or redis as the <protocol> in order to take advantage of Istio's routing features. For example, name: http2-foo or name: http are valid port names, but name: http2foo is not. If the port name does not begin with a recognized prefix or if the port is unnamed, traffic on the port will be treated as plain TCP traffic (unless the port explicitly uses Protocol: UDP to signify a UDP port).

• Service association: If a pod belongs to multiple Kubernetes services, the services cannot use the same port number for different protocols, for instance HTTP and TCP.

• Deployments with app and version labels: It is recommended that pods deployed using the Kubernetes Deployment have an explicit app label and version label in the deployment specification. Each deployment specification should have a distinct app label with a value indicating something meaningful, with version indicating the version of the app that the particular deployment corresponds to. The app label is used to add contextual information in distributed tracing. The app and version labels are also used to add contextual information in the metric telemetry collected by Istio.

See also