Learn how Istio secures service-to-service traffic for your Kubernetes clusters and how to integrate with Auth0 for securing end-user traffic.
TL;DR: In this article, you will learn how to secure applications running on Kubernetes with Istio and Auth0. You will start by creating a brand-new cluster and then deploy an unsecured sample application. After testing the deployment, you will learn how to secure this application and its pods with Istio and Auth0. For reference, you can find this application in this GitHub repository.
Preface
Security is the most crucial aspect to get right in every application. Failing to secure your apps and the identity of your users can be very expensive. Moreover, it can make customers and investors lose faith in your ability to deliver high-quality services. Therefore, it's of paramount importance to strictly follow standards and best practices when developing an application. Luckily, big vendors like Auth0, Microsoft, Facebook, and Google can simplify this task by working as the identity providers of your apps. These companies, alongside increased security, also enable users to quickly log in to your apps without having to create yet another set of credentials.
Authentication and authorization are more complex for microservice architectures, as they require implementation on every service. The scenario can become even more problematic if you use different stacks to build these microservices. For each stack, you would have a different set of best practices and libraries to use (probably even write), increasing the surface area of possible bugs and consuming company resources that could be invested in providing business value.
To solve this problem, you will learn about Istio and how to integrate it with Auth0. As you will see, by using one of the authentication features provided by Istio, you can easily avoid this problem and secure your applications without code changes.
Prerequisites
Before learning about Istio and how to use it, you need to get your hands on a Kubernetes cluster with admin access. Next, you will need kubectl, the Kubernetes command-line tool, to interact with the cluster. To install kubectl, head over to the official documentation and follow the instructions for your operating system.
In this article, we use Kubernetes In Docker, known as kind. Still, you can use any other local Kubernetes distribution such as Docker-Desktop (installation and usage), Rancher Desktop, or Minikube.
To install kind, follow the installation instructions in the Kind Quick Start.
Creating a cluster with kind
After installing kind, you can create a Kubernetes cluster with the following command:
kind create cluster --image=kindest/node:v1.23.1
This command pulls a container image with the Kubernetes version 1.23.1 and runs it on your container runtime. For example, if you are on Docker, you can see the running container by executing:
docker ps
Your output will show a new container running:
CONTAINER ID IMAGE COMMAND NAMES
2974301ffa31 kindest/node:v1.23.1 "/usr/loca…" kind-control-plane
Note: In this article, we use Kubernetes version 1.23. Istio 1.14 is compatible with versions 1.20 and onwards. To learn about the supported releases of Kubernetes, check the official docs at Istio > Supported Kubernetes releases.
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