Prepare an offline installation of Cloud Service Mesh

This page explains how to prepare offline installations of Cloud Service Mesh on supported platforms other than GKE on Google Cloud.

Note: This guide only supports Cloud Service Mesh with Istio APIs and does not support Google Cloud APIs. For more information see, Cloud Service Mesh overview.

When you use the asmcli tool to install Cloud Service Mesh, the tool uses a local directory to store configuration and artifacts. By default, the tool creates a temporary directory when it runs, or you can specify an existing directory by using the --output_dir option on the command line. If the specified directory already contains the necessary configuration and artifacts, the tool re-uses those instead of re-downloading them.

Offline installation uses this behavior so that you can install Cloud Service Mesh on machines without internet access. You first run the asmcli build-offline-package subcommand on a machine with internet access to populate an output directory with the required configuration package, and then copy that directory to the offline machines for installation.

Before you begin

Before you begin, make sure that you:

• Review the prerequisites.

• Review the information in Plan the install.

• Install the required tools.

• Download asmcli.

• During installation, ensure access to Google APIs and Services is possible, or manually enable the required dependencies. Even in offline mode, asmcli uses Google Cloud CLI to enable some dependencies if the corresponding flag is passed during installation.

Note: The core installation manifests for canonical-service-controller require pulling the kube-rbac-proxy image from Docker Hub (docker.io). In restricted or air-gapped environments, configure a registry mirror at the cluster or containerd level, such as a private Harbor registry, to resolve this image dependency without opening outbound firewall egress to the public internet. For more information about configuring a registry mirror in Google Distributed Cloud environments, see Use a registry mirror for container images.

Offline installation of Cloud Service Mesh

The following outlines how to prepare an offline installation of Cloud Service Mesh:

1. On the machine with internet access that you installed Cloud Service Mesh, create a package and then save it to the folder OFFLINE_PKG_DIR_PATH:

   ./asmcli build-offline-package \
   --output_dir OFFLINE_PKG_DIR_PATH
   

   Note: The offline-package includes critical hidden files. You must copy all of the files to the offline machine. To avoid missing files, create an archive bundle of the entire output_dir and copy it to the offline machine.

2. Copy the configuration directory and asmcli tool to the offline machine.

3. Follow the instructions for installing Cloud Service Mesh. Wherever the instructions specify to run asmcli install, ensure that you also pass the --offline flag and specify the configuration directory created in the previous steps:

     ./asmcli install \
     --output_dir OFFLINE_PKG_DIR_PATH \
     --project_id PROJECT_ID \
     --cluster_location CLUSTER_LOCATION \
     --cluster_name CLUSTER_NAME \
     --offline
   

What's next?

• Learn about setting up a multi-cluster mesh outside of Google Cloud.

• Configure an external IP address on-premises.

• Deploy the Online Boutique sample application.