Istio Traffic Management
Comprehensive guide to Istio traffic management for production service mesh deployments.
When to Use This Skill
- Configuring service-to-service routing
- Implementing canary or blue-green deployments
- Setting up circuit breakers and retries
- Load balancing configuration
- Traffic mirroring for testing
- Fault injection for chaos engineering
Core Concepts
1. Traffic Management Resources
2. Traffic Flow
Templates
Template 1: Basic Routing
Template 2: Canary Deployment
Template 3: Circuit Breaker
Template 4: Retry and Timeout
Template 5: Traffic Mirroring
Template 6: Fault Injection
Template 7: Ingress Gateway
Load Balancing Strategies
Best Practices
Do's
- Start simple - Add complexity incrementally
- Use subsets - Version your services clearly
- Set timeouts - Always configure reasonable timeouts
- Enable retries - But with backoff and limits
- Monitor - Use Kiali and Jaeger for visibility
Don'ts
- Don't over-retry - Can cause cascading failures
- Don't ignore outlier detection - Enable circuit breakers
- Don't mirror to production - Mirror to test environments
- Don't skip canary - Test with small traffic percentage first


