Traffic Management Policies — Vocabulary
5 exercises — 5 exercises practising Istio traffic management vocabulary — VirtualService, DestinationRule, canary routing, and traffic shifting language.
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Your team is deploying a new version of the checkout service. You want to send 10% of traffic to v2 and 90% to v1 without changing DNS or redeploying. Which Istio resources do you need, and how would you describe the setup?
Istio canary releases require two resources working together: VirtualService (where traffic goes, with weights) and DestinationRule (which pods each subset refers to).
The VirtualService controls routing decisions — it says "send 90% to the v1 subset and 10% to the v2 subset." The DestinationRule defines what those subsets are — it maps subset name v1 to pods matching the label version: v1. Without the DestinationRule, the VirtualService has no way to distinguish v1 pods from v2 pods. Changing the canary percentage is a simple config update to the VirtualService weights — no redeployment required.
Key vocabulary:
• VirtualService weight — integer 0-100 controlling traffic proportion; all weights in a route must sum to 100
• DestinationRule subset — named group defined by pod label selectors
• canary deployment (via mesh) — gradual traffic shifting using weights; differs from canary via replica count
The VirtualService controls routing decisions — it says "send 90% to the v1 subset and 10% to the v2 subset." The DestinationRule defines what those subsets are — it maps subset name v1 to pods matching the label version: v1. Without the DestinationRule, the VirtualService has no way to distinguish v1 pods from v2 pods. Changing the canary percentage is a simple config update to the VirtualService weights — no redeployment required.
Key vocabulary:
• VirtualService weight — integer 0-100 controlling traffic proportion; all weights in a route must sum to 100
• DestinationRule subset — named group defined by pod label selectors
• canary deployment (via mesh) — gradual traffic shifting using weights; differs from canary via replica count