Overview

Traffic management is non-intrusive and is a core function of Istio. With traffic management, you can focus on your own service logic rather than service access management. Traffic management is required in the following scenarios:

• Load balancing policies are changed dynamically for cross-service access, for example, consistent hashing configured to forward traffic to specific service instances.
• A percentage of traffic needs to be distributed to a version when the service has two versions.
• Services need protection, for example, limiting the number of concurrent connections and requests, and isolating faulty service instances.
• The content of a service is changed dynamically or service fault is being simulated.

ASM provides traffic management capabilities such as retries, timeouts, connection pools, circuit breaking, load balancing, HTTP headers, and fault injection, meeting the requirements in most service scenarios.