Traffic Director overview
This document is for network administrators and service owners who want to familiarize themselves with Traffic Director and its capabilities.
Traffic Director is a managed control plane for application networking. Traffic Director lets you deliver global, highly available services with advanced application networking capabilities such as traffic management and observability.
As the number of services and microservices in your deployment grows, you typically start to encounter common application networking challenges such as the following:
- How do I make my services resilient?
- How do I get traffic to my services, and how do services know about and communicate with each other?
- How do I understand what is happening when my services are communicating with each other?
- How do I update my services without risking an outage?
- How do I manage the infrastructure that makes my deployment possible?
Traffic Director helps you solve these types of challenges in a modern, service-based deployment. Traffic Director relies on Google Cloud-managed infrastructure so that you don't have to manage your own infrastructure. You focus on shipping application code that solves your business problems while letting Traffic Director manage the application networking complexities.
Traffic Director for service mesh
A common pattern for solving application networking challenges is to use a service mesh. Traffic Director supports service mesh and many other deployment patterns that fit your needs.
In a typical service mesh, the following is true:
- You deploy your services to a Kubernetes cluster.
- Each of the services' Pods has a dedicated proxy (usually Envoy) running as a sidecar proxy.
- Each sidecar proxy talks to the networking infrastructure (a control plane) that is installed in your cluster. The control plane tells the sidecar proxies about services, endpoints, and policies in your service mesh.
- When a Pod sends or receives a request, the request goes to the Pod's sidecar proxy. The sidecar proxy handles the request, for example, by sending it to its intended destination.
In the diagrams in this document and other Traffic Director documents, the six-
sided pink icons represent the proxies. The control plane is connected to each
proxy and provides information that the proxies need to handle requests. Arrows
between boxes show traffic flows. For example, application code in Service A
sends a request. The proxy handles the request and forwards it to Service B.
This model enables you to move networking logic out of your application code. You can focus on delivering business value while letting your infrastructure take care of application networking.
How Traffic Director is different
Traffic Director works similarly to that model, but it's different in important ways. It all starts with the fact that Traffic Director is a Google Cloud-managed service. You don't install it, it doesn't run in your cluster, and you don't need to maintain it.
In the following diagram, Traffic Director is the control plane. There are four
services in this Kubernetes cluster, each with sidecar proxies that are
connected to Traffic Director. Traffic Director provides the information that
the proxies need to route requests. For example, application code on a Pod that
belongs to Service A sends a request. The sidecar proxy running alongside this
Pod handles the request and routes it to a Pod that belongs to Service B.
Beyond service mesh
Traffic Director supports more types of deployments than a typical service mesh.
Multi-cluster Kubernetes
With Traffic Director, you get application networking that works across
Kubernetes clusters. In the following diagram, Traffic Director provides the
control plane for Kubernetes clusters in us-central1 and europe-west1.
Requests can be routed among the three services in us-central1, among the
two services in europe-west1, and between services in the two clusters.
Your service mesh can extend across multiple Kubernetes clusters in multiple Google Cloud regions. Services in one cluster can talk to services in another cluster. You can even have services that consist of Pods in multiple clusters.
With Traffic Director's proximity-based global load balancing, requests
destined for Service B go to the nearest Pod that can serve the request. You
also get seamless failover; if a Pod is down, the request
automatically fails over to another Pod that can serve the request, even if
this Pod is in a different Kubernetes cluster.
Virtual machines
Kubernetes is becoming increasingly popular, but many workloads are deployed to virtual machine (VM) instances. Traffic Director solves application networking for these workloads, too; your VM-based workloads easily interoperate with your Kubernetes-based workloads.
In the following diagram, traffic enters your deployment through the
external Application Load Balancer. It is routed to Service A in the Kubernetes cluster
in asia-southeast1 and to Service D on a VM in europe-west1.
Google provides a seamless mechanism to set up VM-based workloads with Traffic Director. You only add a flag to your Compute Engine VM instance template, and Google handles the infrastructure setup. This setup includes installing and configuring the proxies that deliver application networking capabilities.
Proxyless gRPC
gRPC is a feature-rich open source RPC framework that you can use to write high-performance microservices. With Traffic Director, you can easily bring application networking capabilities (such as service discovery, load balancing, and traffic management) to your gRPC applications. For more information, see Traffic Director and gRPC—proxyless services for your service mesh.
In the following diagram, gRPC applications route traffic to services based in Kubernetes clusters in one region and to services running on VMs in different regions. Two of the services include sidecar proxies, and the others are proxyless.
Traffic Director supports proxyless gRPC services. These services use a recent version of the open source gRPC library that supports the xDS APIs. Your gRPC applications can connect to Traffic Director by using the same xDS APIs that Envoy uses.
After your applications are connected, the gRPC library takes care of application networking functionality such as service discovery, load balancing, and traffic management. This functionality happens natively in gRPC, so service proxies are not required—that's why they're called proxyless gRPC applications.
Ingress and gateways
For many use cases, you need to handle traffic that originates from clients that aren't configured by Traffic Director. For example, you might need to ingress public internet traffic to your microservices. You might also want to configure a load balancer as a reverse proxy that handles traffic from a client before sending it on to a destination.
In the following diagram, an external Application Load Balancer enables ingress for external clients, with traffic routed to services in a Kubernetes cluster. An internal Application Load Balancer routes internal traffic to the service running on the VM.
Traffic Director works with Cloud Load Balancing to provide a managed ingress experience. You set up an external or internal load balancer, and then configure that load balancer to send traffic to your microservices. In the preceding diagram, public internet clients reach your services through the external Application Load Balancer. Clients, such as microservices that reside on your Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) network, use an internal Application Load Balancer to reach your services.
For some use cases, you might want to set up Traffic Director to configure a gateway. A gateway is essentially a reverse proxy, typically Envoy running on one or more VMs, that listens for inbound requests, handles them, and sends them to a destination. The destination can be in any Google Cloud region or Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) cluster. It can even be a destination outside of Google Cloud that is reachable from Google Cloud by using hybrid connectivity. For more information on when to use a gateway, see Ingress traffic for your mesh.
In the following diagram, a VM in the europe-west1 region runs a proxy that
acts as a gateway to three services that are not running proxies. Traffic
from both an external Application Load Balancer and an internal Application Load Balancer is routed to the gateway
and then to the three services.
Multiple environments
Whether you have services in Google Cloud, on-premises, in other clouds, or all of these, your fundamental application networking challenges remain the same. How do you get traffic to these services? How do these services communicate with each other?
In the following diagram, Traffic Director routes traffic from services
running in Google Cloud to Service G, running in another public cloud,
and to Service E and Service F, both running in an on-premises data center.
Service A, Service B, and Service C use Envoy as a sidecar proxy, while
Service D is a proxyless gRPC service.
When you use Traffic Director, you can send requests to destinations outside of Google Cloud. This enables you to use Cloud Interconnect or Cloud VPN to privately route traffic from services inside Google Cloud to services or gateways in other environments.
Setting up Traffic Director
Setting up Traffic Director consists of two steps. After you complete the setup process, your infrastructure handles application networking, and Traffic Director keeps everything up to date based on changes to your deployment.
Deploy your applications
First, you deploy your application code to containers or VMs. Google provides mechanisms that let you easily add application networking infrastructure (typically Envoy proxies) to your VM instances and Pods. This infrastructure is set up to talk to Traffic Director and learn about your services.
Configure Traffic Director
Next, you configure your global services and define how traffic should be handled. To configure Traffic Director, you can use the Google Cloud console (for some features and configurations), the Google Cloud CLI, the Traffic Director API, or other tooling, such as Terraform.
After you complete these steps, Traffic Director is ready to configure your application networking infrastructure.
Infrastructure handles application networking
When an application sends a request to my-service, your application networking
infrastructure (for example, an Envoy sidecar proxy) handles the request
according to information received from Traffic Director. This enables a request
for my-service to be seamlessly routed to an application instance that is able
to receive the request.
Monitoring and continuous updates
Traffic Director monitors the application instances that constitute your services. This monitoring enables Traffic Director to discover that a service is healthy or that a service's capacity has changed—for example, when a new Kubernetes Pod is created. Based on this information, Traffic Director continuously updates your application networking infrastructure.
Features
Traffic Director's features deliver application networking capabilities to your microservices. Some highlights are discussed in this section.
Fully managed control plane, health checking, and load balancing
You want to spend your time delivering business value, not managing infrastructure. Traffic Director is a fully managed solution with an uptime SLA, so you don't have to install, configure, or update infrastructure. You benefit from the same infrastructure that Google uses for health checking and global load balancing.
Built on open source products
Traffic Director uses the same control plane (xDS) APIs that popular open source projects such as Envoy and Istio use. To view supported API versions, see the xDS control plane APIs.
The infrastructure that delivers application networking capabilities—either Envoy or gRPC depending on your use case—is also open source, so you don't need to worry about being locked in to proprietary infrastructure.
Scale
From one-off application networking solutions to massive service mesh deployments with thousands of services, Traffic Director is built to meet your scaling requirements.
Service discovery and tracking your endpoints and backends
When your application sends a request to my-service, your infrastructure
seamlessly handles the request and sends it to the correct destination. Your
application doesn't need to know anything about IP addresses, protocols, or
other networking complexities.
Global load balancing and failover
Traffic Director uses Google's global load balancing and health checking to optimally balance traffic based on client and backend location, backend proximity, health, and capacity. You improve your service availability by having traffic automatically fail over to healthy backends with capacity. You can customize load balancing to distribute traffic to properly support your business needs.
Traffic management
Advanced traffic management, including routing and request manipulation (based on hostname, path, headers, cookies, and more), enables you to determine how traffic flows between your services. You can also apply actions like retries, redirects, and weight-based traffic splitting for canary deployments. Advanced patterns like fault injection, traffic mirroring, and outlier detection enable DevOps use cases that improve your resiliency.
Observability
Your application networking infrastructure collects telemetry information, such as metrics, logs, and traces, that can be aggregated centrally in Google Cloud's operations suite. After this information is collected, you can gain insights and create alerts so that if anything goes wrong, you get notified.
VPC Service Controls
You can use VPC Service Controls to provide additional security for your application's resources and services. You can add projects to service perimeters that protect resources and services (like Traffic Director) from requests that originate outside the perimeter. To learn more about VPC Service Controls, see the VPC Service Controls overview.
To learn more about using Traffic Director with VPC Service Controls, see the Supported products page.
What's next
To deploy Traffic Director:
- For Compute Engine with VMs, use the service routing APIs.
- For Google Kubernetes Engine with Pods, use the Gateway APIs.
To find uses cases and architecture patterns for proxyless gRPC services, see the Proxyless gRPC services overview.
To learn how traffic management gives you control over how traffic is handled, see the Advanced traffic management overview.
To learn how Traffic Director supports environments that extend beyond Google Cloud, see the following documents: