Traffic Shaping Strategies Using Kubernetes and Istio

Service mesh in Kubernetes has evolved there are multiple types of service mesh for different use cases. Either you need a hybrid network with VM's and containers or high performance options using eBPF . 

This article I want to provide a quick how to on how to do traffic shaping with Istio. It is way easier to do this rather than applying this on application. Once you try out it you will be using it most often for Development and QA . 

Well Can't I do this in my Microservice ?

Yes , its common e.g Applying the new version of the API only particular type of customer or only for a certain list of customers . Here are the reasons you should consider Kubernetes approach 

Unified traffic management and Fine-grained control

Kubernetes provides more granular control over network traffic at the infrastructure level, allowing you to shape traffic based on various criteria such as source, destination, and protocol. This level of control may not be easily achievable through microservice design patterns alone.

Infrastructure-level management

Traffic shaping in Kubernetes operates at the cluster level, affecting all services running within it. This allows for consistent traffic management across the entire application ecosystem, regardless of individual microservice implementations.

Dynamic Scaling

If you are using in Production Kubernetes can automatically adjust traffic shaping rules based on the current state of the cluster, such as the number of pods or resource utilization. This dynamic approach is harder to implement solely through microservice design patterns.

How about in Development and QA ?

Good thing about this is also the fact that you can try this locally or in your Dev and QA to stimulate and test various cases , even if you are not using containers in production . Create different containers for different version of the API's deploy them using Kubernetes  . I have provided the step by step instruction below 

Step by Step

Github

Containerization Github List  ->   Github Containers