Traffic mirroring

The live traffic mirroring capability of Istio is very useful for shadowing traffic from a production service to a mirror service. Istio allows complete mirroring from one service to another or a portion of the traffic. It is very important that mirroring should happen without impacting the critical path of the original application.

Mirroring traffic using Istio is sometimes branded as out of band since mirroring is accomplished asynchronously through Istio's sidecar proxy. The mirrored traffic should be identified distinctly. This is done by appending shadow to the Host or Authority header.

Let's understand traffic mirroring or shadowing through an example.

We will create two versions of the httpbin service and enable ...

Get Mastering Service Mesh now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.