This document provides an overview of how Traffic Director and Service Directory work together to give applications in your service mesh access to services listed in the Service Directory registry.
Traffic Director is a service mesh control plane that enables global routing, load balancing, regional failover, and security for heterogeneous deployments. This includes deployments that use sidecars, edge or middle proxies, and proxyless gRPC clients.
Integrating Service Directory and Traffic Director makes services registered with Service Directory available to Traffic Director services.
Service Directory makes it easier to access and track your services in a single central registry. This includes Google Cloud services such as GKE, internal passthrough Network Load Balancers, internal Application Load Balancers, and on-premises and multicloud services. When a service producer creates a GKE service or a load balancer, the service or load balancer can automatically be registered with Service Directory through the integrations.
After a service is in Service Directory, you can configure Traffic Director to enable Traffic Director clients to access any service registered in Service Directory, such as internal passthrough Network Load Balancers and internal Application Load Balancers.
Using Service Directory's service registry with Traffic Director makes services in the service registry available to the applications in your mesh and to gateways configured by Traffic Director.
Registering your Traffic Director with Service Directory lets you do the following.
- Make existing services available to Traffic Director
- Improve coordination between service producers and consumers
- Access services in a perimeter using an ingress point
- Connect services across domains
- Apply policies when accessing services
For detailed information about these capabilities, see Use cases for Traffic Director integration with Service Directory.
To integrate your services, you register a service with Service Directory, then bind the service to a Traffic Director backend service. After a binding is established, Traffic Director queries Service Directory to obtain information about the registered service and how that service can be reached.
For detailed information about how to set up Traffic Director with Service Directory, see Set up Traffic Director with Service Directory.
What's next
- To get an overview of Service Directory, see the Service Directory overview.
- To get a detailed overview of Traffic Director and Service Directory integration, see Traffic Director integration with Service Directory.
- For instructions about how to set up Traffic Director with Service Directory, see Set up Traffic Director with Service Directory
- To find solutions for common issues that you might encounter when using Service Directory, see Troubleshooting.