1.10. Traffic management

Requests are routed to a services within a service mesh with virtual services. Each virtual service consists of a set of routing rules that are evaluated in order. Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh matches each given request to the virtual service to a specific real destination within the mesh.

Without virtual services, Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh distributes traffic using round-robin load balancing between all service instances. With a virtual service, you can specify traffic behavior for one or more hostnames. Routing rules in the virtual service tell Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh how to send the traffic for the virtual service to appropriate destinations. Route destinations can be versions of the same service or entirely different services.

The following example routes requests to different versions of a service depending on which user connects to the application. Use this command to apply this example YAML file, or one you create.

$ oc apply -f - <<EOF
apiVersion: networking.istio.io/v1alpha3
kind: VirtualService
metadata:
  name: reviews
spec:
  hosts:
  - reviews
  http:
  - match:
    - headers:
        end-user:
          exact: jason
    route:
    - destination:
        host: reviews
        subset: v2
  - route:
    - destination:
        host: reviews
        subset: v3
EOF

The hosts field lists the virtual service’s user-addressable destination that these routing rules apply to. This is the address or addresses the client uses when sending requests to the service.

The virtual service hostname can be an IP address, a DNS name, or, depending on the platform, a short name that resolves to a fully qualified domain name.

spec:
  hosts:
  - reviews

The http section contains the virtual service’s routing rules, describing match conditions and actions for routing HTTP/1.1, HTTP2, and gRPC traffic sent to the destination specified in the hosts field. A routing rule consists of the destination where you want the traffic to go and zero or more match conditions, depending on your use case.

spec:
  hosts:
  - reviews
  http:
  - match:
    - headers:
      end-user:
        exact: jason

spec:
  hosts:
  - reviews
  http:
  - match:
    - headers:
      end-user:
        exact: jason
    route:
    - destination:
      host: reviews
      subset: v2

Destination rules are applied after virtual service routing rules are evaluated, so they apply to the traffic’s real destination. Virtual services route traffic to a destination. Destination rules configure what happens to traffic at that destination.

apiVersion: networking.istio.io/v1alpha3
kind: DestinationRule
metadata:
  name: my-destination-rule
spec:
  host: my-svc
  trafficPolicy:
    loadBalancer:
      simple: RANDOM
  subsets:
  - name: v1
    labels:
      version: v1
  - name: v2
    labels:
      version: v2
    trafficPolicy:
      loadBalancer:
        simple: ROUND_ROBIN
  - name: v3
    labels:
      version: v3

You can use a gateway to manage inbound and outbound traffic for your mesh to specify which traffic you want to enter or leave the mesh. Gateway configurations are applied to standalone Envoy proxies that are running at the edge of the mesh, rather than sidecar Envoy proxies running alongside your service workloads.

Unlike other mechanisms for controlling traffic entering your systems, such as the Kubernetes Ingress APIs, Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh gateways let you use the full power and flexibility of traffic routing. The Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh gateway resource can layer 4-6 load balancing properties such as ports to expose, Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh TLS settings. Instead of adding application-layer traffic routing (L7) to the same API resource, you can bind a regular Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh virtual service to the gateway and manage gateway traffic like any other data plane traffic in a service mesh.

Gateways are primarily used to manage ingress traffic, but you can also configure egress gateways. An egress gateway lets you configure a dedicated exit node for the traffic leaving the mesh, letting you limit which services have access to external networks, or to enable secure control of egress traffic to add security to your mesh, for example. You can also use a gateway to configure a purely internal proxy.

apiVersion: networking.istio.io/v1alpha3
kind: Gateway
metadata:
  name: ext-host-gwy
spec:
  selector:
    istio: ingressgateway # use istio default controller
  servers:
  - port:
    number: 443
    name: https
    protocol: HTTPS
    hosts:
    - ext-host.example.com
    tls:
      mode: SIMPLE
      serverCertificate: /tmp/tls.crt
      privateKey: /tmp/tls.key

This gateway configuration lets HTTPS traffic from ext-host.example.com into the mesh on port 443, but doesn’t specify any routing for the traffic.

To specify routing and for the gateway to work as intended, you must also bind the gateway to a virtual service. You do this using the virtual service’s gateways field, as shown in the following example:

apiVersion: networking.istio.io/v1alpha3
kind: VirtualService
metadata:
  name: virtual-svc
spec:
  hosts:
  - ext-host.example.com
  gateways:
    - ext-host-gwy

You can then configure the virtual service with routing rules for the external traffic.

A service entry adds an entry to the service registry that Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh maintains internally. After you add the service entry, the Envoy proxies can send traffic to the service as if it was a service in your mesh. Configuring service entries allows you to manage traffic for services running outside of the mesh, including the following tasks:

apiVersion: networking.istio.io/v1alpha3
kind: ServiceEntry
metadata:
  name: svc-entry
spec:
  hosts:
  - ext-svc.example.com
  ports:
  - number: 443
    name: https
    protocol: HTTPS
  location: MESH_EXTERNAL
  resolution: DNS

Specify the external resource using the hosts field. You can qualify it fully or use a wildcard prefixed domain name.

You can configure virtual services and destination rules to control traffic to a service entry in the same way you configure traffic for any other service in the mesh. For example, the following destination rule configures the traffic route to use mutual TLS to secure the connection to the ext-svc.example.com external service that is configured using the service entry:

apiVersion: networking.istio.io/v1alpha3
kind: DestinationRule
metadata:
  name: ext-res-dr
spec:
  host: ext-svc.example.com
  trafficPolicy:
    tls:
      mode: MUTUAL
      clientCertificate: /etc/certs/myclientcert.pem
      privateKey: /etc/certs/client_private_key.pem
      caCertificates: /etc/certs/rootcacerts.pem

By default, Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh configures every Envoy proxy to accept traffic on all the ports of its associated workload, and to reach every workload in the mesh when forwarding traffic. You can use a sidecar configuration to do the following:

apiVersion: networking.istio.io/v1alpha3
kind: Sidecar
metadata:
  name: default
  namespace: bookinfo
spec:
  egress:
  - hosts:
    - "./*"
    - "istio-system/*"