Introduction to Istio Traffic Management

Traffic Routing with Istio by Example

What is Istio?

The continued adoption of microservices architectures and the move toward complex distributed applications composed of decoupled components that communicate via APIs introduces various new challenges for developers. While these types of applications help us to encapsulate, reuse, and efficiently scale discrete components of business logic, they also require a lot more network traffic between services, which makes the need for reliable, secure, and observable channels of communication all the more important.

This is where Istio comes in. Istio is an open-source Service Mesh that helps to simplify the communication between microservices in distributed applications. The core features of Istio generally fall into one of three categories:

• Traffic Management: Istio’s Traffic Management capabilities include support for resilience patterns like Retry Policies and Circuit Breakers, as well as request routing capabilities to support scenarios like A/B Testing and Canary Deployments. The Traffic Management components of Istio are what we are going to focus on primarily in the article.
• Observability: When applications are running in the service mesh, Istio provides out-of-the-box Metrics, Traces, and Logs to provide engineers with observability of service health and behavior. We will see shortly how Istio is able to generate this telemetry without any additional work…