Create single cluster mesh

Prerequisites 🔗︎

You need the Backyards CLI tool installed on your computer, as described in the Prerequisites section.

Install Backyards 🔗︎

For a quick demo or evaluation, complete the following steps to install Backyards with every component, including the demo application. If you prefer a more interactive installation, see Installing Backyards interactively.

1. Run the following command. This will install Backyards and the demo application, then generate synthetic traffic and open a browser tab to show you the results.

   Register for the free version and install the CLI.

   Backyards supports KUBECONFIG contexts having the following authentication methods:

   • certfile and keyfile
   • certdata and keydata
   • bearer token
   • exec/auth provider

   Username-password pairs are not supported. If you are installing Backyards in a test environment you can install it without requiring authentication by running:

   backyards install --anonymous-auth -a --run-demo
   

   

   Note: If you are installing Backyards on a local cluster (for example, using MiniKube) and you don’t have a local LoadBalancer setup, use a NodePort type istio-ingressgateway service. To do that, create a file called local_istio_cr.yaml with the following content:

   apiVersion: istio.banzaicloud.io/v1beta1
   kind: Istio
   metadata:
       name: mesh
       namespace: istio-system
   spec:
       gateways:
       ingress:
           serviceType: "NodePort"
   

   Then, run the following command.

   Register for the free tier version of Cisco Service Mesh Manager (formerly called Banzai Cloud Backyards) and follow the Getting Started Guide for up-to-date instructions on the installation.

2. Explore the features:

   At this point, Backyards is up and running. You can experiment with any of the available features from the documentation or from our blogs.

Install Backyards interactively 🔗︎

1. For an interactive installation, complete the following steps. Execute the following command to:

   • Install the Backyards core, which provides a dashboard and an internal API for handling the service mesh.
   • Install and execute the Istio operator.
   • Install a demo application (optional).

   backyards install
   

   Note: If you don’t need the demo application, you can simply accept the defaults by pressing enter for each question as it will only install the core components. You can install additional components later.

2. Take a look at the Backyards dashboard:

   backyards dashboard
   

   If you don’t already have Istio workload and traffic, the dashboard will be empty.

3. Install the demo application. If you chose not to install the demo application, you can deploy it manually:

   backyards demoapp install
   

4. Generate some traffic between the components to draw a picture of the data flow.

   backyards demoapp load start
   

   (If you want to stop generating traffic, run backyards demoapp load stop)

5. Explore the features:

   At this point, Backyards is up and running. You can experiment with any of the available features from the documentation or from our blogs.