Istio traffic management revolves around handling north-south traffic ( traffic in and out of the mesh ) and east-west traffic ( traffic between services the mesh ). Istio is able to auto detect services endpoints in a cluster and in turn , populates a service registry.

The following API resources enable the configuration and adoption of Istio’s traffic management

• Virtual services which provide routing configuration to services within the mesh.
• Destination rules which allow you to provide routing to a subset of services and are paired with virtualservices.
• Gateways which are used to manage traffic entering or leaving the service mesh.
• Service Entry which is used to add entries into the internal service registry.

Istio also has some advanced traffic management strategies like circuit breaking , mirroring and fault injection. Examples and walkthroughs can be found here.

Additional resources

The following additional resources are helpful in understanding traffic management:

• Istio in production - Traffic routing
• Istio traffic routing and resiliency
• Istio ingress gateway