Traffic Management in Kubernetes
Get hands-on! K8s traffic management with Emissary Ingress + Linkerd
Traffic Management
Hands-On Course:
Manage K8s traffic
Full Service Ownership with Kubernetes
The cloud-native story doesn't end when an app is deployed. The emerging trend of “full service ownership” or “full cycle development” for the developer means following through once apps are in production, ensuring that the application is both available to end users and running optimally. And when something goes wrong, which it inevitably will, it means handling the failure, limiting the impact for users, and examining through blameless postmortems what went wrong and how to prevent it from happening again.
Traffic Management: Reliability, Observability, and Security
When the time comes to run a cloud-native application, the first order of business is actually getting external “user” traffic into your Kubernetes cluster and to your backend services, which requires a way to manage incoming traffic.
A Kubernetes-native ingress controller, such as Emissary Ingress, serves this purpose, routing and securing traffic into your cluster. However, an ingress only deals with the “first hop” of external traffic entering a cluster. With a microservices-based system there are often multiple hops between dependent services.
A service mesh, such as Linkerd, provides additional traffic management functionality for service-to-service communication within a Kubernetes cluster.
Both ingress and service meshes provide “layer 7” (L7 from the OSI model) traffic management capabilities, such as load balancing, rate limiting, and circuit breaking. These are key to safeguarding availability and scalability. They also offer traffic observability, from top line rate, error, and duration (RED) metrics all the way through to access logs and distributed tracing to visualize the flow of a user request through the microservice graph.
Hands-on: K8s Traffic Management: Emissary Ingress + Linkerd
Read: Ingress Traffic and Linkerd
Read: Emissary Service Routing and DiscoveryComplete the following tutorial: Linkerd Getting Started Guide
Complete the following tutorial: Emissary Quick Start Guide
Complete the following tutorial: Installing Emissary-ingress with the Linkerd service mesh
Optional readings
- Introduction to the service mesh—the easy way
- The Service Mesh: What Every Software Engineer Needs to Know about the World's Most Over-Hyped Technology
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