Traffic Director: Traffic management for open service mesh(cloud.google.com)
cloud.google.com
Traffic Director: Traffic management for open service mesh
https://cloud.google.com/traffic-director/
10 comments
classic cloud announcement. a new service that sorta does something sorta different based on sorta mature sorta open source that is sorta configurable and has no pricing of yet. but sure, let's go ahead and announce it.
sorry for the rant, just realized my gke microservices requires a minimum of $18/month each to be exposed externally..
If you want to know a bit more, follow Matt Klein, the creator of Envoy, he's commented on this a bit. https://twitter.com/mattklein123
Is this controlling Istio under the hood?
Kind of. It's only the traffic management part, i.e. the external load balancer. It seems to be a mix of a managed Istio Pilot plus a bunch of stuff from GCLB: anycast, backend subsetting (Envoy does not do the health checking), etc. TD just tells each client which servers to talk to. It doesn't forward traffic. And it doesn't seem to be responsible for injecting the sidecars in clients.
From documentation:
Traffic Director delivers a GCP-managed Pilot along with additional capabilities such as global load balancing and centralized health checking. However, note that Traffic Director cannot be configured using Istio APIs in this Beta release; you can use GCP APIs for configuration. Both Traffic Director and Pilot use open standard APIs (xDS v2) to communicate with service proxies.
Traffic Director delivers a GCP-managed Pilot along with additional capabilities such as global load balancing and centralized health checking. However, note that Traffic Director cannot be configured using Istio APIs in this Beta release; you can use GCP APIs for configuration. Both Traffic Director and Pilot use open standard APIs (xDS v2) to communicate with service proxies.
This seems like a response to the AWS Global Accelerator - a an anycast network that will route your traffic to the nearest configured load balancer, and shift traffic out if any of the LBs are down. Might also do all the internal routing on Google’s private which should be faster and more reliable than the public internet.
GCP has had global load balancing for a while now, which IIRC is anycast based. This is more their equivalent of App Mesh.