Multi-cluster Traffic Management

Within a multicluster mesh, traffic rules specific to the cluster topology may be desirable. This document describes a few ways to manage traffic in a multicluster mesh. Before reading this guide:

1. Read Deployment Models
2. Make sure your deployed services follow the concept of namespace sameness.

Keeping traffic in-cluster

In some cases the default cross-cluster load balancing behavior is not desirable. To keep traffic “cluster-local” (i.e. traffic sent from cluster-a will only reach destinations in cluster-a), mark hostnames or wildcards as clusterLocal using MeshConfig.serviceSettings.

For example, you can enforce cluster-local traffic for an individual service, all services in a particular namespace, or globally for all services in the mesh, as follows:

serviceSettings:
- settings:
    clusterLocal: true
  hosts:
  - "mysvc.myns.svc.cluster.local"

serviceSettings:
- settings:
    clusterLocal: true
  hosts:
  - "*.myns.svc.cluster.local"

serviceSettings:
- settings:
    clusterLocal: true
  hosts:
  - "*"

Partitioning Services

DestinationRule.subsets allows partitioning a service by selecting labels. These labels can be the labels from Kubernetes metadata, or from built-in labels. One of these built-in labels, topology.istio.io/cluster, in the subset selector for a DestinationRule allows creating per-cluster subsets.

apiVersion: networking.istio.io/v1beta1
kind: DestinationRule
metadata:
  name: mysvc-per-cluster-dr
spec:
  host: mysvc.myns.svc.cluster.local
  subsets:
  - name: cluster-1
    labels:
      topology.istio.io/cluster: cluster-1
  - name: cluster-2
    labels:
      topology.istio.io/cluster: cluster-2

Using these subsets you can create various routing rules based on the cluster such as mirroring or shifting.

This provides another option to create cluster-local traffic rules by restricting the destination subset in a VirtualService:

apiVersion: networking.istio.io/v1beta1
kind: VirtualService
metadata:
  name: mysvc-cluster-local-vs
spec:
  hosts:
  - mysvc.myns.svc.cluster.local
  http:
  - name: "cluster-1-local"
    match:
    - sourceLabels:
        topology.istio.io/cluster: "cluster-1"
    route:
    - destination:
        host: mysvc.myns.svc.cluster.local
        subset: cluster-1
  - name: "cluster-2-local"
    match:
    - sourceLabels:
        topology.istio.io/cluster: "cluster-2"
    route:
    - destination:
        host: mysvc.myns.svc.cluster.local
        subset: cluster-2

Using subset-based routing this way to control cluster-local traffic, as opposed to MeshConfig.serviceSettings, has the downside of mixing service-level policy with topology-level policy. For example, a rule that sends 10% of traffic to v2 of a service will need twice the number of subsets (e.g., cluster-1-v2, cluster-2-v2). This approach is best limited to situations where more granular control of cluster-based routing is needed.