Virtual Service
Configuration affecting traffic routing. Here are a few terms useful to define in the context of traffic routing.
Service
a unit of application behavior bound to a unique name in a
service registry. Services consist of multiple network endpoints
implemented by workload instances running on pods, containers, VMs etc.
Service versions (a.k.a. subsets)
- In a continuous deployment
scenario, for a given service, there can be distinct subsets of
instances running different variants of the application binary. These
variants are not necessarily different API versions. They could be
iterative changes to the same service, deployed in different
environments (prod, staging, dev, etc.). Common scenarios where this
occurs include A/B testing, canary rollouts, etc. The choice of a
particular version can be decided based on various criterion (headers,
url, etc.) and/or by weights assigned to each version. Each service has
a default version consisting of all its instances.
Source
- A downstream client calling a service.
Host
- The address used by a client when attempting to connect to a
service.
Access model
- Applications address only the destination service
(Host) without knowledge of individual service versions (subsets). The
actual choice of the version is determined by the proxy/sidecar, enabling the
application code to decouple itself from the evolution of dependent
services.
A VirtualService
defines a set of traffic routing rules to apply when a host is
addressed. Each routing rule defines matching criteria for traffic of a specific
protocol. If the traffic is matched, then it is sent to a named destination service
(or subset/version of it) defined in the registry.
The source of traffic can also be matched in a routing rule. This allows routing to be customized for specific client contexts.
The following example on Kubernetes, routes all HTTP traffic by default to pods of the reviews service with label “version: v1”. In addition, HTTP requests with path starting with /wpcatalog/ or /consumercatalog/ will be rewritten to /newcatalog and sent to pods with label “version: v2”.
apiVersion: networking.istio.io/v1alpha3
kind: VirtualService
metadata:
name: reviews-route
spec:
hosts:
- reviews.prod.svc.cluster.local
http:
- match:
- uri:
prefix: "/wpcatalog"
- uri:
prefix: "/consumercatalog"
rewrite:
uri: "/newcatalog"
route:
- destination:
host: reviews.prod.svc.cluster.local
subset: v2
- route:
- destination:
host: reviews.prod.svc.cluster.local
subset: v1
A subset/version of a route destination is identified with a reference
to a named service subset which must be declared in a corresponding
DestinationRule
.
apiVersion: networking.istio.io/v1alpha3
kind: DestinationRule
metadata:
name: reviews-destination
spec:
host: reviews.prod.svc.cluster.local
subsets:
- name: v1
labels:
version: v1
- name: v2
labels:
version: v2
CorsPolicy
Describes the Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) policy, for a given
service. Refer to CORS
for further details about cross origin resource sharing. For example,
the following rule restricts cross origin requests to those originating
from example.com domain using HTTP POST/GET, and sets the
Access-Control-Allow-Credentials
header to false. In addition, it only
exposes X-Foo-bar
header and sets an expiry period of 1 day.
apiVersion: networking.istio.io/v1alpha3
kind: VirtualService
metadata:
name: ratings-route
spec:
hosts:
- ratings.prod.svc.cluster.local
http:
- route:
- destination:
host: ratings.prod.svc.cluster.local
subset: v1
corsPolicy:
allowOrigin:
- example.com
allowMethods:
- POST
- GET
allowCredentials: false
allowHeaders:
- X-Foo-Bar
maxAge: "24h"
Destination
Destination indicates the network addressable service to which the request/connection will be sent after processing a routing rule. The destination.host should unambiguously refer to a service in the service registry. Istio’s service registry is composed of all the services found in the platform’s service registry (e.g., Kubernetes services, Consul services), as well as services declared through the ServiceEntry resource.
Note for Kubernetes users: When short names are used (e.g. “reviews” instead of “reviews.default.svc.cluster.local”), Istio will interpret the short name based on the namespace of the rule, not the service. A rule in the “default” namespace containing a host “reviews will be interpreted as “reviews.default.svc.cluster.local”, irrespective of the actual namespace associated with the reviews service. To avoid potential misconfigurations, it is recommended to always use fully qualified domain names over short names.
The following Kubernetes example routes all traffic by default to pods of the reviews service with label “version: v1” (i.e., subset v1), and some to subset v2, in a Kubernetes environment.
apiVersion: networking.istio.io/v1alpha3
kind: VirtualService
metadata:
name: reviews-route
namespace: foo
spec:
hosts:
- reviews # interpreted as reviews.foo.svc.cluster.local
http:
- match:
- uri:
prefix: "/wpcatalog"
- uri:
prefix: "/consumercatalog"
rewrite:
uri: "/newcatalog"
route:
- destination:
host: reviews # interpreted as reviews.foo.svc.cluster.local
subset: v2
- route:
- destination:
host: reviews # interpreted as reviews.foo.svc.cluster.local
subset: v1
And the associated DestinationRule
apiVersion: networking.istio.io/v1alpha3
kind: DestinationRule
metadata:
name: reviews-destination
namespace: foo
spec:
host: reviews # interpreted as reviews.foo.svc.cluster.local
subsets:
- name: v1
labels:
version: v1
- name: v2
labels:
version: v2
The following VirtualService sets a timeout of 5s for all calls to productpage.prod.svc.cluster.local service in Kubernetes. Notice that there are no subsets defined in this rule. Istio will fetch all instances of productpage.prod.svc.cluster.local service from the service registry and populate the sidecar’s load balancing pool. Also, notice that this rule is set in the istio-system namespace but uses the fully qualified domain name of the productpage service, productpage.prod.svc.cluster.local. Therefore the rule’s namespace does not have an impact in resolving the name of the productpage service.
apiVersion: networking.istio.io/v1alpha3
kind: VirtualService
metadata:
name: my-productpage-rule
namespace: istio-system
spec:
hosts:
- productpage.prod.svc.cluster.local # ignores rule namespace
http:
- timeout: 5s
route:
- destination:
host: productpage.prod.svc.cluster.local
To control routing for traffic bound to services outside the mesh, external services must first be added to Istio’s internal service registry using the ServiceEntry resource. VirtualServices can then be defined to control traffic bound to these external services. For example, the following rules define a Service for wikipedia.org and set a timeout of 5s for http requests.
apiVersion: networking.istio.io/v1alpha3
kind: ServiceEntry
metadata:
name: external-svc-wikipedia
spec:
hosts:
- wikipedia.org
location: MESH_EXTERNAL
ports:
- number: 80
name: example-http
protocol: HTTP
resolution: DNS
apiVersion: networking.istio.io/v1alpha3
kind: VirtualService
metadata:
name: my-wiki-rule
spec:
hosts:
- wikipedia.org
http:
- timeout: 5s
route:
- destination:
host: wikipedia.org
HTTPFaultInjection
HTTPFaultInjection can be used to specify one or more faults to inject while forwarding http requests to the destination specified in a route. Fault specification is part of a VirtualService rule. Faults include aborting the Http request from downstream service, and/or delaying proxying of requests. A fault rule MUST HAVE delay or abort or both.
Note: Delay and abort faults are independent of one another, even if both are specified simultaneously.
HTTPFaultInjection.Abort
Abort specification is used to prematurely abort a request with a pre-specified error code. The following example will return an HTTP 400 error code for 1 out of every 1000 requests to the “ratings” service “v1”.
apiVersion: networking.istio.io/v1alpha3
kind: VirtualService
metadata:
name: ratings-route
spec:
hosts:
- ratings.prod.svc.cluster.local
http:
- route:
- destination:
host: ratings.prod.svc.cluster.local
subset: v1
fault:
abort:
percentage:
value: 0.001
httpStatus: 400
The httpStatus field is used to indicate the HTTP status code to return to the caller. The optional percentage field can be used to only abort a certain percentage of requests. If not specified, all requests are aborted.
HTTPFaultInjection.Delay
Delay specification is used to inject latency into the request forwarding path. The following example will introduce a 5 second delay in 1 out of every 1000 requests to the “v1” version of the “reviews” service from all pods with label env: prod
apiVersion: networking.istio.io/v1alpha3
kind: VirtualService
metadata:
name: reviews-route
spec:
hosts:
- reviews.prod.svc.cluster.local
http:
- match:
- sourceLabels:
env: prod
route:
- destination:
host: reviews.prod.svc.cluster.local
subset: v1
fault:
delay:
percentage:
value: 0.001
fixedDelay: 5s
The fixedDelay field is used to indicate the amount of delay in seconds. The optional percentage field can be used to only delay a certain percentage of requests. If left unspecified, all request will be delayed.
HTTPMatchRequest
HttpMatchRequest specifies a set of criterion to be met in order for the
rule to be applied to the HTTP request. For example, the following
restricts the rule to match only requests where the URL path
starts with /ratings/v2/ and the request contains a custom end-user
header
with value jason
.
apiVersion: networking.istio.io/v1alpha3
kind: VirtualService
metadata:
name: ratings-route
spec:
hosts:
- ratings.prod.svc.cluster.local
http:
- match:
- headers:
end-user:
exact: jason
uri:
prefix: "/ratings/v2/"
route:
- destination:
host: ratings.prod.svc.cluster.local
HTTPMatchRequest CANNOT be empty.
HTTPRedirect
HTTPRedirect can be used to send a 301 redirect response to the caller, where the Authority/Host and the URI in the response can be swapped with the specified values. For example, the following rule redirects requests for /v1/getProductRatings API on the ratings service to /v1/bookRatings provided by the bookratings service.
apiVersion: networking.istio.io/v1alpha3
kind: VirtualService
metadata:
name: ratings-route
spec:
hosts:
- ratings.prod.svc.cluster.local
http:
- match:
- uri:
exact: /v1/getProductRatings
redirect:
uri: /v1/bookRatings
authority: newratings.default.svc.cluster.local
...
HTTPRetry
Describes the retry policy to use when a HTTP request fails. For example, the following rule sets the maximum number of retries to 3 when calling ratings:v1 service, with a 2s timeout per retry attempt.
apiVersion: networking.istio.io/v1alpha3
kind: VirtualService
metadata:
name: ratings-route
spec:
hosts:
- ratings.prod.svc.cluster.local
http:
- route:
- destination:
host: ratings.prod.svc.cluster.local
subset: v1
retries:
attempts: 3
perTryTimeout: 2s
retryOn: gateway-error,connect-failure,refused-stream
HTTPRewrite
HTTPRewrite can be used to rewrite specific parts of a HTTP request before forwarding the request to the destination. Rewrite primitive can be used only with HTTPRouteDestination. The following example demonstrates how to rewrite the URL prefix for api call (/ratings) to ratings service before making the actual API call.
apiVersion: networking.istio.io/v1alpha3
kind: VirtualService
metadata:
name: ratings-route
spec:
hosts:
- ratings.prod.svc.cluster.local
http:
- match:
- uri:
prefix: /ratings
rewrite:
uri: /v1/bookRatings
route:
- destination:
host: ratings.prod.svc.cluster.local
subset: v1
HTTPRoute
Describes match conditions and actions for routing HTTP/1.1, HTTP2, and gRPC traffic. See VirtualService for usage examples.
HTTPRouteDestination
Each routing rule is associated with one or more service versions (see glossary in beginning of document). Weights associated with the version determine the proportion of traffic it receives. For example, the following rule will route 25% of traffic for the “reviews” service to instances with the “v2” tag and the remaining traffic (i.e., 75%) to “v1”.
apiVersion: networking.istio.io/v1alpha3
kind: VirtualService
metadata:
name: reviews-route
spec:
hosts:
- reviews.prod.svc.cluster.local
http:
- route:
- destination:
host: reviews.prod.svc.cluster.local
subset: v2
weight: 25
- destination:
host: reviews.prod.svc.cluster.local
subset: v1
weight: 75
And the associated DestinationRule
apiVersion: networking.istio.io/v1alpha3
kind: DestinationRule
metadata:
name: reviews-destination
spec:
host: reviews.prod.svc.cluster.local
subsets:
- name: v1
labels:
version: v1
- name: v2
labels:
version: v2
Traffic can also be split across two entirely different services without having to define new subsets. For example, the following rule forwards 25% of traffic to reviews.com to dev.reviews.com
apiVersion: networking.istio.io/v1alpha3
kind: VirtualService
metadata:
name: reviews-route-two-domains
spec:
hosts:
- reviews.com
http:
- route:
- destination:
host: dev.reviews.com
weight: 25
- destination:
host: reviews.com
weight: 75
Headers
Header manipulation rules
Headers.HeaderOperations
HeaderOperations Describes the header manipulations to apply
L4MatchAttributes
L4 connection match attributes. Note that L4 connection matching support is incomplete.
Percent
Percent specifies a percentage in the range of [0.0, 100.0].
PortSelector
PortSelector specifies the number of a port to be used for matching or selection for final routing.
RouteDestination
L4 routing rule weighted destination.
StringMatch
Describes how to match a given string in HTTP headers. Match is case-sensitive.
TCPRoute
Describes match conditions and actions for routing TCP traffic. The following routing rule forwards traffic arriving at port 27017 for mongo.prod.svc.cluster.local to another Mongo server on port 5555.
apiVersion: networking.istio.io/v1alpha3
kind: VirtualService
metadata:
name: bookinfo-Mongo
spec:
hosts:
- mongo.prod.svc.cluster.local
tcp:
- match:
- port: 27017
route:
- destination:
host: mongo.backup.svc.cluster.local
port:
number: 5555
TLSMatchAttributes
TLS connection match attributes.
TLSRoute
Describes match conditions and actions for routing unterminated TLS traffic (TLS/HTTPS) The following routing rule forwards unterminated TLS traffic arriving at port 443 of gateway called “mygateway” to internal services in the mesh based on the SNI value.
apiVersion: networking.istio.io/v1alpha3
kind: VirtualService
metadata:
name: bookinfo-sni
spec:
hosts:
- "*.bookinfo.com"
gateways:
- mygateway
tls:
- match:
- port: 443
sniHosts:
- login.bookinfo.com
route:
- destination:
host: login.prod.svc.cluster.local
- match:
- port: 443
sniHosts:
- reviews.bookinfo.com
route:
- destination:
host: reviews.prod.svc.cluster.local