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.
| 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 Fixing Items Manually or Fixing Items Automatically.
