Traffic Director Overview

This presentation introduces an overview of Service mesh , Envoy and Istio before getting into Traffic Director features and discussing the product's roadmap.

Featured in Google Cloud NEXT 19' Recap session by Mercari: https://mercaridev.connpass.com/event/125881/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/la1nra
GitHub: https://github.com/lainra

References:
- https://cloud.google.com/traffic-director/docs/
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUITCYMCEhU&list=PLPbi1SSrOfS8ZZKIGWfwsTdW-XosAkj1t
- https://istio.io/docs/concepts/what-is-istio/
- https://www.envoyproxy.io/docs/envoy/latest/intro/what_is_envoy

Transcript

1. Traffic Director Overview
   

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2. 2
   About me
   @lainra (GitHub)
   Twitter / @la1nra
   Please follow me :)
   フォローしてね！:)
   SRE at Mercari microservices
   platform team
   I love that bridge!!!
   

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3. 3
   Table of contents
   ・Service Mesh Overview
   ・Istio in GCP
   ・Traffic Director Overview
   ・What’s next?
   

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4. 4
   What is a service mesh?
   A service mesh is a network communication infrastructure which
   allows decoupling and offloading most of the application network
   functions from the application code.
   Service Mesh Overview
   

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5. 5
   Decoupling the network features
   With Virtual Machines
   Service Mesh Overview
   VM
   App
   Sidecar
   proxy
   VM
   App
   Sidecar
   proxy
   VM
   App
   Sidecar
   proxy
   VM
   App
   Sidecar
   proxy
   Pod
   App
   Sidecar
   proxy
   Pod
   App
   Sidecar
   proxy
   Pod
   App
   Sidecar
   proxy
   Pod
   App
   Sidecar
   proxy
   Data plane
   (proxy mesh)
   Control plane
   (controls,
   configures
   proxies)
   Controller
   With Kubernetes Pods
   Service mesh
   

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6. 6
   Service Mesh Key Capabilities
   - Telemetry: Examine everything between services with little to no
   instrumentation
   - Security: Secure access and communications between some or all
   services
   - Traffic Control: Manage the flow of traffic into, out of, and within
   your complex deployments
   Service Mesh Overview
   

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7. 7
   Envoy, the universal data plane
   Service Mesh Overview
   Based on open configuration & control plane called
   xDS (Discovery Service, actually v2)
   - LDS,RDS,CDS,EDS,ADS,SDS,LRS,HDS (too
   much!!!)
   - proto3 Protocol Buffers canonical definition
   - Streaming gRPC, REST long poll based
   - Eventually & sequentially consistent
   A modern extensible lightweight L4/L7 high performance proxy built as a
   platform.
   - Network filter
   - HTTP filter
   - Listener filter
   - Health checker
   - Transport sockets
   - Address resolver
   - Clustering
   - Retry policy
   

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8. 8
   Istio, the
   industry-standard
   service mesh
   control plane
   Service Mesh Overview
   

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9. 9
   Istio Addon for GKE(Google Kubernetes Engine)
   + The simplest way to install Istio in your GKE cluster
   + Deployment managed by GCP, automatic upgrades and patches
   + Underlying Istio complexity (partially) removed from the customer
   Istio in GCP
   - Still in Beta
   - Fast evolving product in GCP, hard to evaluate the product’s roadmap
   - Cannot modify or tailor the control plane (Pilot) to your needs
   - Hard to separate/disable some Istio components/features you don’t need
   

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10. 10
    But… I only have VMs, what can I do???
    Istio in GCP
    

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11. 11
    Here comes in Traffic Director (Beta)
    Traffic Director is a GCP-managed configuration & traffic control plane for any xDS
    compliant proxy (less formally, GCP-managed Pilot for Istio)
    - Can be used both by GCP VMs and Kubernetes Pods (self-managed K8s, GKE)
    - Sidecar proxy management -> Offload it from your responsibility
    - Communicates with sidecar proxies with open xDS APIs -> Prevent technology
    lock-in
    - Integrates with Global Load Balancing (GLB) -> Leverage GLB cross-region
    capabilities
    - Centralized Health Checking
    - Traffic-driven autoscaling
    - Traffic control capabilities (based on Envoy features) in Alpha
    Traffic Director Overview
    

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12. 12
    I’m a bit biased :) (But I don’t work for Google!)
    Traffic Director Overview
    

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13. 13
    Source: https://cloud.google.com/traffic-director/docs/setting-up-traffic-director
    Traffic Director Overview
    - Uses the same data
    model as GLB
    - Need to inject Envoys
    by yourself
    - Need to create
    NEG/MIG
    - (NEG requires
    enabling Alias IP in
    your VPC)
    - Configuration through
    GCP API only
    (support for Istio API
    in the future)
    

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14. 14
    Traffic Director features
    Routing Rules : define how requests
    should be served in the service mesh
    - Traffic splitting
    - Traffic steering
    - Timeouts and Retries
    - Fault Injection
    - Mirroring
    Traffic Director Overview
    Traffic Policies : define routing policies for
    a service
    - Load balancing
    - Outlier detection
    - Circuit breaker
    - Timeouts
    

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15. 15
    Main use cases (non exhaustive)
    - I want to try the Service Mesh but am too afraid/lacking resources to invest in Istio
    - I have an existing Envoy mesh but no control plane (unlikely)
    - I have an existing Envoy mesh and an internally-made control plane (more likely)
    - I wish to use a managed service to pilot my Envoy mesh
    - I want to bring my VMs / both VMs and pods to the service mesh
    - I want to expose my services globally using GLB and Envoy mesh
    - I want HTTP/2 native load-balancing (not supported yet, on roadmap)
    Traffic Director Overview
    

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16. 16
    Who is it not for? (also non exhaustive!)
    - People who already use Istio AND are satisfied with it
    - People who wants to expose their services through an API
    Gateway/API Management component
    - People who don’t want to use GCP APIs to control their service
    mesh (until Istio API support)
    - People who think it will magically solve all their
    network/microservices issues
    Traffic Director Overview
    

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17. 17
    Traffic Director Roadmap
    - Hybrid/Multi-cloud support
    - Better integration with Anthos
    - Service meshes control plane federation
    - Security integration (Adding more Istio features such as mTLS, RBAC)
    - Observability integration (Adding Istio Mixer features with Stackdriver)
    - and other secrets yet untold…
    Ultimately, Traffic Director could be the standard way to Istio in GCP
    What’s next?
    

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18. 18
    - Traffic Director official documentation
    - Cloud NEXT 19’ Traffic Director session recording
    - Istio official documentation
    - Envoy official documentation
    Resources
    

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19. Thank you for coming!
    (We’re hiring!!!)
    

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