Overview

Non-intrusive traffic management is a core function of Istio. With traffic management, you only need to focus on your own service logic rather than service access management. Traffic management enables you to:

  • Dynamically modify load balancing policies for cross-service access, such as configuring consistent hashing to forward traffic to specific service pods.

  • Distribute a certain proportion of traffic to a specific version of a service when the service has two online versions.

  • Protect services, for example, limiting the number of concurrent connections and requests, and isolating faulty service pods.

  • Dynamically modify the content of a service or simulate a service running fault.

ASM provides retry, timeout, connection pool, outlier detection, load balancing, HTTP header, and fault injection functions to meet traffic management requirements in most service scenarios.

Table 1 Common mesh functions and management roles

Mesh Function

Management Role

Service Initiator

Service Provider

Route management

Y

N

Load balancing

Y

N

Tracing analysis

Y

Y

Service authentication

Y

Y

Observability data

Y

Y

Retry

Y

N

Rewrite

Y

N

Redirection

Y

N

Authorization

N

Y

Fault injection

Y

N

Timeout

Y

N

Connection pool

Y

N

Outlier detection

Y

N

HTTP header

Y

N

Constraints

Traffic management cannot be performed for the service whose configuration diagnosis fails. For details about rectifying faults, see Manual Fixing Items or Auto Fixing Items.