Istio - Weight-based routing

TIP

Screencast: https://asciinema.org/a/229605?t=470 (opens new window)

https://istio.io/docs/tasks/traffic-management/traffic-shifting/#apply-weight-based-routing (opens new window)

In Canary Deployments, newer versions of services are incrementally rolled out to users to minimize the risk and impact of any bugs introduced by the newer version.

Route a percentage of traffic to one service or another - send %50 of traffic to reviews:v1 and %50 to reviews:v3 and finally complete the migration by sending %100 of traffic to reviews:v3.

Route all traffic to the reviews:v1 version of each microservice:

kubectl apply -f samples/bookinfo/networking/virtual-service-all-v1.yaml

Transfer 50% of the traffic from reviews:v1 to reviews:v3:

kubectl apply -f samples/bookinfo/networking/virtual-service-reviews-50-v3.yaml

Confirm the rule was replaced:

kubectl get virtualservice reviews -o yaml

Output:

apiVersion: networking.istio.io/v1alpha3
kind: VirtualService
metadata:
  name: reviews
  ...
spec:
  hosts:
  - reviews
  http:
  - route:
    - destination:
        host: reviews
        subset: v1
      weight: 50
    - destination:
        host: reviews
        subset: v3
      weight: 50

Refresh the /productpage in your browser and you now see red colored star ratings approximately 50% of the time.

Check the flows in Kiali graph, where only reviews:{v1,v2} are used:

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Assuming you decide that the reviews:v3 microservice is stable, you can route 100% of the traffic to reviews:v3 by applying this virtual service.

kubectl apply -f samples/bookinfo/networking/virtual-service-reviews-v3.yaml

When you refresh the /productpage you will always see book reviews with red colored star ratings for each review.

Kiali graph:

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