---
title: " Request Routing and Policy Management with the Istio Service Mesh "
date: 2017-10-10
slug: request-routing-and-policy-management
url: /blog/2017/10/Request-Routing-And-Policy-Management
author: >
  Frank Budinsky (IBM),
  Andra Cismaru (Google),
  Israel Shalom (Google)
---
_**Editor's note:** Today’s post is the second post in a three-part series on Istio._

In a [previous article](https://kubernetes.io/blog/2017/05/managing-microservices-with-istio-service-mesh), we looked at a [simple application (Bookinfo)](https://istio.io/docs/guides/bookinfo.html) that is composed of four separate microservices. The article showed how to deploy an application with Kubernetes and an Istio-enabled cluster without changing any application code. The article also outlined how to view Istio provided L7 metrics on the running services.  

This article follows up by taking a deeper look at Istio using Bookinfo. Specifically, we’ll look at two more features of Istio: request routing and policy management.  


## Running the Bookinfo Application
As before, we run the v1 version of the Bookinfo application. After [installing Istio](https://istio.io/docs/setup/kubernetes/quick-start.html) in our cluster, we start the app defined in [bookinfo-v1.yaml](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/istio/istio/master/samples/kubernetes-blog/bookinfo-v1.yaml) using the following command:  



 ```  
kubectl apply -f \<(istioctl kube-inject -f bookinfo-v1.yaml)
  ```

We created an Ingress resource for the app:




 ```  
cat \<\<EOF | kubectl create -f -

apiVersion: extensions/v1beta1

kind: Ingress

metadata:

 name: bookinfo

 annotations:

     kubernetes.io/ingress.class: "istio"

spec:

 rules:

 - http:

         paths:

         - path: /productpage

             backend:

                 serviceName: productpage

                 servicePort: 9080

         - path: /login

             backend:

                 serviceName: productpage

                 servicePort: 9080

         - path: /logout

             backend:

                 serviceName: productpage

                 servicePort: 9080

EOF
  ```

Then we retrieved the NodePort address of the Istio Ingress controller:



 ```  
export BOOKINFO\_URL=$(kubectl get po -n istio-system -l istio=ingress -o jsonpath={.items[0].status.hostIP}):$(kubectl get svc -n istio-system istio-ingress -o jsonpath={.spec.ports[0].nodePort})
  ```

Finally, we pointed our browser to [http://$BOOKINFO\_URL/productpage](about:blank), to see the running v1 application:



 ![](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/kGRJnhkf30FBOY2pyZzID90f_zxlyMUv43hEvfq70bcmYhKrGv2em2qph21k-ahlwfBthV3XQSf6CuUQXMlvgSlOUJr4W1ksDVXIvChEd6a5Y51lwepHmyQx2ksJgUpyTiEbZN11)