To clarify "Istio Operator Install" doc which seems to contain incorrect info

Contributors Operator
1

I am referring to the red alert shown in the docs of Istio / Istio Operator Install which says:

Prior to Istio 1.10.0, the namespace istio-system needs to be created before installing the operator. As of Istio 1.10.0, this is no longer required.

Here is what i did.

Removed all istio namespaces from GKE cluster.

$ kubectl delete namespace istio-operator istio-system

Installed istioctl version 1.10.2 in MacOS following Istio / Using the Istioctl Command-line Tool.

Then ran the following:

$ istioctl operator dump > operator_dump.yaml
$ kubectl apply -f operator_dump.yaml

Confirmed that the istio-operator is up & running

$ kubectl rollout status deployment/istio-operator -n=istio-operator
deployment "istio-operator" successfully rolled out

The Error

The next step involves applying the IstioOperator CRD following the docs in Istio / Istio Operator Install

kubectl apply -f - <<EOF
apiVersion: install.istio.io/v1alpha1
kind: IstioOperator
metadata:
  namespace: istio-system
  name: example-istiocontrolplane
spec:
  profile: demo
EOF

At this point i expect it to just work. But i got the following error:

Error from server (NotFound): error when creating "STDIN": namespaces "istio-system" not found

This behavior does not align with the alert given in the same doc which says as of Istio 1.10.0, the namespace istio-system no longer needs to be created beforehand

Can please help me understand the matter here. Or does the doc need revision?

2

Hi syedrakib,

Could you please raise an issue here?

https://github.com/istio/istio.io/issues/9892 was closed as having fixed this, but we’ll get Shamsher to comment.

3

Raised issue here https://github.com/istio/istio.io/issues/10321

4

This confusion has now been addressed by Rewrite operator install docs for clarity around creating namespace by craigbox · Pull Request #10343 · istio/istio.io · GitHub

The updated warning in Istio / Istio Operator Install now reads:

[…] As of Istio 1.10.0, the istioctl operator init will create the istio-system namespace. […] If you use something other than istioctl operator init , then the istio-system namespace needs to be created manually.