Scuttle

scuttle Is a wrapper application that makes it easy to run containers next to Istio sidecars. It ensures the main application doesn't start until envoy is ready, and that the istio sidecar shuts down when the application exits. This particularly useful for Jobs that need Istio sidecar injection, as the Istio pod would otherwise run indefinitely after the job is completed.

This application, if provided an ENVOY_ADMIN_API environment variable, will poll indefinitely with backoff, waiting for envoy to report itself as live, implying it has loaded cluster configuration (for example from an ADS server). Only then will it execute the command provided as an argument.

All signals are passed to the underlying application. Be warned that SIGKILL cannot be passed, so this can leave behind a orphaned process.

When the application exits, unless NEVER_KILL_ISTIO_ON_FAILURE has been set and the exit code is non-zero, scuttle will instruct envoy to shut down immediately.

Environment variables

Variable	Purpose
ENVOY_ADMIN_API	This is the path to envoy's administration interface, in the format http://127.0.0.1:15000. If provided, scuttle will poll this url at /server_info waiting for envoy to report as LIVE. If provided and local (127.0.0.1 or localhost), then envoy will be instructed to shut down if the application exits cleanly.
NEVER_KILL_ISTIO	If provided and set to true, scuttle will not instruct istio to exit under any circumstances.
NEVER_KILL_ISTIO_ON_FAILURE	If provided and set to true, scuttle will not instruct istio to exit if the main binary has exited with a non-zero exit code.
SCUTTLE_LOGGING	If provided and set to true, scuttle will log various steps to the console which is helpful for debugging
START_WITHOUT_ENVOY	If provided and set to true, scuttle will not wait for envoy to be LIVE before starting the main application. However, it will still instruct envoy to exit.
WAIT_FOR_ENVOY_TIMEOUT	If provided and set to a valid time.Duration string greater than 0 seconds, scuttle will wait for that amount of time before starting the main application. By default, it will wait indefinitely. If QUIT_WITHOUT_ENVOY_TIMEOUT is set as well, it will take precedence over this variable
ISTIO_QUIT_API	If provided scuttle will send a POST to /quitquitquit at the given API. Should be in format http://127.0.0.1:15020. This is intended for Istio v1.3 and higher. When not given, Istio will be stopped using a pkill command.
GENERIC_QUIT_ENDPOINTS	If provided scuttle will send a POST to the URL given. Multiple URLs are supported and must be provided as a CSV string. Should be in format http://myendpoint.com or http://myendpoint.com,https://myotherendpoint.com. The status code response is logged (if logging is enabled) but is not used. A 200 is treated the same as a 404 or 500. GENERIC_QUIT_ENDPOINTS is handled before Istio is stopped.
QUIT_WITHOUT_ENVOY_TIMEOUT	If provided and set to a valid duration, scuttle will exit if Envoy does not become available before the end of the timeout and not continue with the passed in executable. If START_WITHOUT_ENVOY is also set, this variable will not be taken into account. Also, if WAIT_FOR_ENVOY_TIMEOUT is set, this variable will take precedence.

How Scuttle stops Istio

Scuttle has two methods to stop Istio. You should configure Scuttle appropriately based on the version of Istio you are using.

Istio Version	Method
1.3 and higher	/quitquitquit endpoint
1.2 and lower	pkill command

1.3 and higher

Version 1.3 of Istio introduced an endpoint /quitquitquit similar to Envoy. By default this endpoint is available at http://127.0.0.1:15020 which is the Pilot Agent service, responsible for managing envoy. (Source)

To enable this, set the environment variable ISTIO_QUIT_API to http://127.0.0.1:15020.

1.2 and lower

Versions 1.2 and lower of Istio have no supported method to stop Istio Sidecars. As a workaround Scuttle stops Istio using the command pkill -SIGINT pilot-agent.

To enable this, you must add shareProcessNamespace: true to your Pod definition in Kubernetes. This allows Scuttle to stop the service running on the sidecar container.

Note: This method is used by default if ISTIO_QUIT_API is not set

Example usage in your Job's Dockerfile

FROM python:latest
# Below command makes scuttle available in path
COPY --from=redboxoss/scuttle:latest /scuttle /bin/scuttle
WORKDIR /app
COPY /app/ ./
ENTRYPOINT ["scuttle", "python", "-m", "my_app"]

Credits

Origin code is forked from the envoy-preflight project on Github, which works for envoy but not for Istio sidecars.