Istio Traffic Management Checklist: Routing, Retries, and Circuit Breaking
How to configure traffic management policies in Istio so your services can do canary releases, retry transient failures, and shed load when a downstream service goes bad. Covers VirtualService, DestinationRule, retries, timeouts, circuit breakers, and outlier detection.
Install Istio with a profile that fits your cluster
CriticalLabel namespaces for sidecar injection, never the whole cluster
CriticalDefine DestinationRule subsets before any routing rules
CriticalSet an explicit timeout on every VirtualService route
CriticalConfigure retries with retryOn, attempts, and perTryTimeout
CriticalSet connection pool limits as your circuit breaker
CriticalEnable outlier detection to evict bad pods automatically
CriticalRoll out new versions with weighted routing
Use header-based routing to test in prod safely
Mirror traffic to validate v2 without serving its responses
Inject faults to test that retries and breakers actually work
Run istioctl analyze before applying any config
CriticalWatch the right metrics so you know when policies fire
CriticalMore checklists
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