Understanding Traffic Management Terminology in Kubernetes

When you start tackling the problem of getting traffic into your Kubernetes cluster, you’ll hear a lot of people talking about north/south vs. east/west traffic. What’s the difference and what do these terms mean?

North/South

North/south traffic is traffic flowing from the user into the cluster, through the ingress.

East/West

East/west traffic is traffic flowing around the Kubernetes cluster, service-to-service or service-to-datastore.