Service discovery
Traffic Director provides service and endpoint discovery. These features let you group the virtual machine (VM) instances and container instances that run your code as endpoints of your services.
Traffic Director monitors these services so that it can share up-to-date information with its clients. Therefore, when one of your applications uses its Traffic Director client (such as an Envoy sidecar proxy) to send a request, it benefits from up-to-date information about your services.
In the context of Traffic Director, a client is application code that runs on a VM or container that formulates requests to send to a server. A server is application code that receives such requests. A Traffic Director client is an Envoy or gRPC or other xDS client that is connected to Traffic Director and is part of the data plane.
In the data plane, Envoy or gRPC does the following:
- It examines a request and matches the request to a backend service, a resource that you configure during deployment.
- After the request is matched, Envoy or gRPC chooses a backend or endpoint and directs the request to that backend or endpoint.
Service discovery
Traffic Director provides service discovery. When you configure Traffic Director, you create backend services. You also define routing rules that specify how an outbound request (a request sent by your application code and handled by a Traffic Director client) is matched to a particular service. When a Traffic Director client handles a request that matches a rule, it can choose the service that should receive the request.
For example:
- You have a VM running your application. This VM has an Envoy sidecar proxy that is connected to Traffic Director and handles outbound requests on behalf of the application.
- You configured a backend service named
payments
. This backend service has two network endpoint group (NEG) backends that point to various container instances that run the code for yourpayments
service. - You configured a routing rule map that has a forwarding rule (with example
IP address
0.0.0.0
and port80
), a target proxy, and a URL map (with example hostnamepayments.example.com
that points to thepayments
service).
With this configuration, when your application (on the VM) sends an HTTP request
to payments.example.com
on port 80
, the Traffic Director client knows that
this request is destined for the payments
service.
When you use Traffic Director with proxyless gRPC services, service discovery works similarly. However, a gRPC library acting as a Traffic Director client only gets information about the services for which you specify an xDS resolver. By default, Envoy gets information about all services configured on the Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) network specified in the Envoy bootstrap file.
Endpoint discovery
Service discovery enables clients to know about your services. Endpoint discovery enables clients to know about the instances that are running your code.
When you create a service, you also specify the backends for that service. These backends are either VMs in managed instance groups (MIGs) or containers in NEGs. Traffic Director monitors these MIGs and NEGs so that it knows when instances and endpoints are created and removed.
Traffic Director continuously shares up-to-date information about these services with its clients. This information enables clients to avoid sending traffic to endpoints that no longer exist. It also enables clients to learn about new endpoints and take advantage of the additional capacity that these endpoints provide.
In the preceding example, Traffic Director returns the two healthy
endpoints in MIG-1 and the three healthy endpoints in MIG-2 for the service
shopping-cart
. Beyond adding endpoints into MIGs or NEGs and
setting up Traffic Director, you don't need any additional
configuration to enable service discovery with Traffic Director.
Sidecar proxy traffic interception in Traffic Director
Traffic Director supports the sidecar proxy model. Under this model, when an
application sends traffic to its destination, iptables
intercept the traffic
and redirect it to the sidecar proxy on the host where the application
is running. The sidecar proxy decides how to load balance the traffic, and then
sends the traffic to its destination.
In the following diagram, which assumes that Traffic Director is correctly configured, Envoy is the sidecar proxy. The sidecar proxy is running on the same host as the application.
A sample service called Web
is configured on virtual IP address (VIP)
10.0.0.1:80
where Traffic Director can discover and load balance it.
Traffic Director discovers the setup through forwarding rule configuration,
which provides the VIP and port. The backends for the service Web
are
configured and function, but they are located outside the Compute Engine
VM host in the diagram.
Traffic Director decides that the optimal backend for traffic to the service
Web
from the host is 192.168.0.1:80
.
The traffic flow in the diagram is as follows:
- The application sends traffic to the service
Web
, which resolves to the IP address10.0.0.1:80
. - The netfilter on the host is configured so that traffic destined to
10.0.0.1:80
is redirected to10.0.0.1:15001
. - Traffic is redirected to
127.0.0.1:15001
, the interception port of the Envoy proxy. - The Envoy proxy interception listener on
127.0.0.1:15001
receives the traffic and performs a lookup for the original destination of the request (10.0.0.1:80
). The lookup results in192.168.0.1:8080
being selected as an optimal backend, as programmed by Traffic Director. - Envoy establishes a connection over the network with
192.168.0.1:8080
and proxies HTTP traffic between the application and this backend until the connection is terminated.
Traffic interception options with automatic Envoy deployment
If you used automatic Envoy deployment with VMs, Traffic Director has additional traffic interception options. You can do the following with these options:
- Intercept all traffic
- Exclude particular ports, port ranges, IP addresses, or CIDR ranges
If you are using the new service routing API Mesh
and Gateway
resources,
all traffic is automatically intercepted.
For more information, see Options for Compute Engine VM setup with automatic Envoy deployment.
What's next
- To learn how Traffic Director delivers global load balancing for your internal microservices with sidecar proxies, see Traffic Director load balancing.
- To learn more about Traffic Director, see the Traffic Director overview.