I am using Istio 1.8 and I want to deploy a multicluster mesh where each cluster is in a different network. I am following the Install Multi-Primary on different networks guide and my environment doesn’t support external load balancers. So when I install an east-west gateway it doesn’t get an external IP and I cannot get any cross-cluster traffic.
Is there any workaround for this (e.g. accessing the gateway using a nodePort)?
Spent more than 1 week with the same problem… Finished installing metalb and providing loadbalancer to my bare metal cluster. Worked out of the box.
I managed to solve this by updating the meshNetworks variable in the istio configMap following the steps as shown here, but pointing the gateway addresses to a node IP and port to the corresponding nodePort of the east-west gateway for each cluster.
Queue the response, “that meshNetworks istio ConfigMap setting is deprecated and shouldn’t really be used”.
Of course, I don’t know the answer to how to do this without setting this ConfigMap entry, but that is what I was told when I did this same thing to workaround the same problem you had.