Emily Clarke

What is Virtual Service in Kubernetes?

When working with Kubernetes, service mesh architectures like Istio are often used. Istio is an infrastructure layer that facilitates communication and security. As a service mesh architecture, Istio and similar infrastructure layers provide traffic management and monitoring as well.

A Kubernetes virtual service is a way to route traffic to varying versions of software through Istio. You might use a Kubernetes virtual service when A/B testing or when setting up metrics to collect for observability.

Virtual Service Use for Policy Enforcement

Although a virtual service can be used for routing, communication and other tasks that require information to be directed to specific destinations when working with microservices, developers can also use virtual service for policy enforcement.

For example, rate limiting is important in both production and testing environments. Failure to rate limit your product may result in an overflow of data that can cause back-end systems to slow or even deny access. Using virtual services like Istio in Kubernetes, developers can set access controls, request authorizations, rate limits and other parameters that can help control the routing and flow of data.

Green-Blue Environments and Virtual Services

Speaking of testing and production environments, you can also use virtual services to set up routing for data that needs to be sent to identical but separate environments. This is ideal when sending data to a testing environment (blue) and a production environment (green). The goal in doing this is to see if and how data behaves differently in each environment so that decisions can be made with more information available to developers.

Handling Communications Failures

Lastly, a virtual service in Kubernetes can be used to handle communication failures such as timeouts and retries. Having protocols in place to handle these exceptions is once again vital since failure to have steps to handle timeouts and retries may mean that code continues running indefinitely, ultimately leading to crashes.

Fault injection can also come into play when using virtual services in this manner since developers can have greater control over the creation of artificial timeout circumstances. Fault injection then allows developers to measure how code reacts under stress to make adjustments where needed.

Author Resource:-

Emily Clarke writes about the different platforms providing high-quality developer and test environments. You can find her thoughts at Kubernetes microservices blog.