I'm using Istio at the moment combined with the cert-manager. Because I need to have multiple certificates I'm using SDS instead of the volume mount approach.
But the hardware requirements for this stuff are really high. For GKE it is recommended to use a node-pool of 4x n1-standard-2 machines. This sums up to 200$ per month just for Istio. The recommendation for EKS is 2x m5.large machines. So it is a little bit cheaper but still around 150$. What confuses me is, that Minikube "just" needs 4vCPUs and 16GB memory in total which is round about the half of the requirements for GKE and EKS.
You'll see the resource hungry components by looking at the istio-system namespace, I mean especially the limits. For me it is:
My question is:
Kind regards from Berlin.
Managed Istio for GKE is offered by Google as a pre-configured bundle. 4x n1-standard-2 is recommended to provide enough resources for all Istio components being installed.
3x n1-standard-1) will fail due to lack of resources. Besides that you wouldn't have free computing capacity for your workloads. Recommended cluster size seems reasonable.4x n1-standard-2), managed Istio can be installed and running on a cluster with configuration 8x n1-standard-1.If the managed Istio for GKE seemed too resource consuming, you could install original version of Istio and select an installation profile with the components you actually need, as described here: