In this series, we will be testing out several features in Istio with a local Kubernetes (k3s) cluster. Deploy k3s cluster First step is to deploy the k8s cluster with k3d - a wrapper to run k3s in docker. Start by creating a k3d config file: # k3d-istio.yaml apiVersion: k3d.io/v1alpha2 kind: Simple name: istio servers: 1 agents: 2 ports: # for exposing Istio ingress on localhost - port: 8080:80 nodeFilters: - loadbalancer - port: 8443:443 nodeFilters: - loadbalancer options: k3s: extraServerArgs: - --no-deploy=traefik # we will be using Istio ingress instead Deploy the cluster with k3d