Istio multi-cluster on minikube

Step-by-step notes for running an Istio service mesh spanning two Kubernetes clusters on a single laptop.

Multi-cluster Istio is normally something you only meet in a real cloud environment. These notes reproduce the same topology locally, so the moving parts — ingress gateways, cross-cluster service discovery, shared trust — can be inspected and deliberately broken without touching any infrastructure.

Read the notes →

What is covered

• Two minikube clusters (cluster-1, cluster-2) on the VirtualBox driver
• The replicated control planes topology: an independent Istio control plane in each cluster, joined through ingress gateways
• Cross-cluster service discovery, with a worked example of traffic crossing the boundary

Running the notes locally

brew install mkdocs
mkdocs serve

Versions

Written against Istio 1.5.4 and verified on macOS. Istio's multi-cluster setup changed substantially in later releases — expect the commands to differ on current versions.