Configuring load balancing

We explained load balancing in Chapter 7, Understanding the Istio Service Mesh. Linkerd uses a smart load balancing mechanism, which is described by William Morgan as follows:

"Linkerd uses an exponentially weighted moving average of response latencies to send requests to the fastest pods automatically. If one pod slows down, even momentarily, Linkerd will shift traffic away from it. This intelligent load balancing can reduce end-to-end tail latencies."

Let's explore how load balancing is configured for the emojivoto application:

  1. Validate the emojivoto microservice and the availability of its pods:
$ kubectl get pods -n emojivotoNAME                        READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGEemoji-697b575bd9-6487c      2/2     Running   0          29mvote-bot-7bd97dfbdc-f8hfv ...

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