Configure Istio traffic management including routing, load balancing, circuit breakers, and canary deployments. Use when implementing service mesh traffic policies, progressive delivery, or resilience patterns.

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 Resource Purpose Scope VirtualService Route traffic to destinations Host based DestinationRule Define policies after routing Service based Gateway Configure ingress/egress Cluster edge ServiceEntry Add external services Mesh wide 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 Debugging Commands

istio-traffic-management