istio-traffic-management

Istio Traffic Management

Comprehensive guide to Istio traffic management for production service mesh deployments.

Do not use this skill when

• The task is unrelated to istio traffic management
• You need a different domain or tool outside this scope

Instructions

• Clarify goals, constraints, and required inputs.
• Apply relevant best practices and validate outcomes.
• Provide actionable steps and verification.
• If detailed examples are required, open resources/implementation-playbook.md.

Use this skill when

• 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

Client → Gateway → VirtualService → DestinationRule → Service
                   (routing)        (policies)        (pods)

Templates

Template 1: Basic Routing

apiVersion: networking.istio.io/v1beta1
kind: Virtu