Destination Rule

    Version specific policies can be specified by defining a named subset and overriding the settings specified at the service level. The following rule uses a round robin load balancing policy for all traffic going to a subset named testversion that is composed of endpoints (e.g., pods) with labels (version:v3).

    1. apiVersion: networking.istio.io/v1alpha3
    2. kind: DestinationRule
    3. metadata:
    4. name: bookinfo-ratings
    5. spec:
    6. host: ratings.prod.svc.cluster.local
    7. trafficPolicy:
    8. loadBalancer:
    9. simple: LEAST_CONN
    10. subsets:
    11. - name: testversion
    12. labels:
    13. version: v3
    14. trafficPolicy:
    15. loadBalancer:
    16. simple: ROUND_ROBIN

    Note: Policies specified for subsets will not take effect until a route rule explicitly sends traffic to this subset.

    Traffic policies can be customized to specific ports as well. The following rule uses the least connection load balancing policy for all traffic to port 80, while uses a round robin load balancing setting for traffic to the port 9080.

    1. apiVersion: networking.istio.io/v1alpha3
    2. kind: DestinationRule
    3. metadata:
    4. name: bookinfo-ratings-port
    5. spec:
    6. host: ratings.prod.svc.cluster.local
    7. trafficPolicy: # Apply to all ports
    8. - port:
    9. number: 80
    10. loadBalancer:
    11. simple: LEAST_CONN
    12. - port:
    13. number: 9080
    14. loadBalancer:
    15. simple: ROUND_ROBIN

    Connection pool settings for an upstream host. The settings apply to each individual host in the upstream service. See Envoy’s circuit breaker for more details. Connection pool settings can be applied at the TCP level as well as at HTTP level.

    For example, the following rule sets a limit of 100 connections to redis service called myredissrv with a connect timeout of 30ms

    1. apiVersion: networking.istio.io/v1alpha3
    2. kind: DestinationRule
    3. metadata:
    4. name: bookinfo-redis
    5. spec:
    6. host: myredissrv.prod.svc.cluster.local
    7. trafficPolicy:
    8. connectionPool:
    9. tcp:
    10. maxConnections: 100
    11. connectTimeout: 30ms
    12. tcpKeepalive:
    13. time: 7200s
    14. interval: 75s

    ConnectionPoolSettings.HTTPSettings

    Settings applicable to HTTP1.1/HTTP2/GRPC connections.

    FieldTypeDescriptionRequired
    http1MaxPendingRequestsint32

    Maximum number of pending HTTP requests to a destination. Default 2^32-1.

    No
    http2MaxRequestsint32

    Maximum number of requests to a backend. Default 2^32-1.

    No
    maxRequestsPerConnectionint32

    Maximum number of requests per connection to a backend. Setting this parameter to 1 disables keep alive. Default 0, meaning “unlimited”, up to 2^29.

    No
    maxRetriesint32

    Maximum number of retries that can be outstanding to all hosts in a cluster at a given time. Defaults to 2^32-1.

    No
    idleTimeoutDuration

    The idle timeout for upstream connection pool connections. The idle timeout is defined as the period in which there are no active requests. If not set, the default is 1 hour. When the idle timeout is reached the connection will be closed. Note that request based timeouts mean that HTTP/2 PINGs will not keep the connection alive. Applies to both HTTP1.1 and HTTP2 connections.

    No
    h2UpgradePolicy

    Specify if http1.1 connection should be upgraded to http2 for the associated destination.

    No

    ConnectionPoolSettings.HTTPSettings.H2UpgradePolicy

    Policy for upgrading http1.1 connections to http2.

    NameDescription
    DEFAULT

    Use the global default.

    DO_NOT_UPGRADE

    Do not upgrade the connection to http2. This opt-out option overrides the default.

    UPGRADE

    Upgrade the connection to http2. This opt-in option overrides the default.

    ConnectionPoolSettings.TCPSettings

    Settings common to both HTTP and TCP upstream connections.

    FieldTypeDescriptionRequired
    maxConnectionsint32

    Maximum number of HTTP1 /TCP connections to a destination host. Default 2^32-1.

    No
    connectTimeoutDuration

    TCP connection timeout.

    No
    tcpKeepalive

    If set then set SO_KEEPALIVE on the socket to enable TCP Keepalives.

    No

    ConnectionPoolSettings.TCPSettings.TcpKeepalive

    TCP keepalive.

    FieldTypeDescriptionRequired
    probesuint32

    Maximum number of keepalive probes to send without response before deciding the connection is dead. Default is to use the OS level configuration (unless overridden, Linux defaults to 9.)

    No
    time

    The time duration a connection needs to be idle before keep-alive probes start being sent. Default is to use the OS level configuration (unless overridden, Linux defaults to 7200s (ie 2 hours.)

    No
    intervalDuration

    The time duration between keep-alive probes. Default is to use the OS level configuration (unless overridden, Linux defaults to 75s.)

    No

    DestinationRule

    DestinationRule defines policies that apply to traffic intended for a service after routing has occurred.

    FieldTypeDescriptionRequired
    hoststring

    The name of a service from the service registry. Service names are looked up from the platform’s service registry (e.g., Kubernetes services, Consul services, etc.) and from the hosts declared by ServiceEntries. Rules defined for services that do not exist in the service registry will be ignored.

    Note for Kubernetes users: When short names are used (e.g. “reviews” instead of “reviews.default.svc.cluster.local”), Istio will interpret the short name based on the namespace of the rule, not the service. A rule in the “default” namespace containing a host “reviews” will be interpreted as “reviews.default.svc.cluster.local”, irrespective of the actual namespace associated with the reviews service. To avoid potential misconfigurations, it is recommended to always use fully qualified domain names over short names.

    Note that the host field applies to both HTTP and TCP services.

    Yes

    Traffic policies to apply (load balancing policy, connection pool sizes, outlier detection).

    No
    subsetsSubset[]

    One or more named sets that represent individual versions of a service. Traffic policies can be overridden at subset level.

    No
    exportTostring[]

    A list of namespaces to which this destination rule is exported. The resolution of a destination rule to apply to a service occurs in the context of a hierarchy of namespaces. Exporting a destination rule allows it to be included in the resolution hierarchy for services in other namespaces. This feature provides a mechanism for service owners and mesh administrators to control the visibility of destination rules across namespace boundaries.

    If no namespaces are specified then the destination rule is exported to all namespaces by default.

    The value “.” is reserved and defines an export to the same namespace that the destination rule is declared in. Similarly, the value “” is reserved and defines an export to all namespaces.

    No

    Load balancing policies to apply for a specific destination. See Envoy’s load balancing for more details.

    For example, the following rule uses a round robin load balancing policy for all traffic going to the ratings service.

    The following example sets up sticky sessions for the ratings service hashing-based load balancer for the same ratings service using the the User cookie as the hash key.

    1. apiVersion: networking.istio.io/v1alpha3
    2. kind: DestinationRule
    3. metadata:
    4. name: bookinfo-ratings
    5. spec:
    6. host: ratings.prod.svc.cluster.local
    7. trafficPolicy:
    8. loadBalancer:
    9. consistentHash:
    10. httpCookie:
    11. name: user
    12. ttl: 0s

    LoadBalancerSettings.ConsistentHashLB

    Consistent Hash-based load balancing can be used to provide soft session affinity based on HTTP headers, cookies or other properties. This load balancing policy is applicable only for HTTP connections. The affinity to a particular destination host will be lost when one or more hosts are added/removed from the destination service.

    FieldTypeDescriptionRequired
    httpHeaderNamestring (oneof)

    Hash based on a specific HTTP header.

    Yes
    httpCookie

    Hash based on HTTP cookie.

    Yes
    useSourceIpbool (oneof)

    Hash based on the source IP address.

    Yes
    minimumRingSizeuint64

    The minimum number of virtual nodes to use for the hash ring. Defaults to 1024. Larger ring sizes result in more granular load distributions. If the number of hosts in the load balancing pool is larger than the ring size, each host will be assigned a single virtual node.

    No

    LoadBalancerSettings.ConsistentHashLB.HTTPCookie

    Describes a HTTP cookie that will be used as the hash key for the Consistent Hash load balancer. If the cookie is not present, it will be generated.

    FieldTypeDescriptionRequired
    namestring

    Name of the cookie.

    Yes
    pathstring

    Path to set for the cookie.

    No
    ttl

    Lifetime of the cookie.

    Yes

    LoadBalancerSettings.SimpleLB

    Standard load balancing algorithms that require no tuning.

    NameDescription
    ROUND_ROBIN

    Round Robin policy. Default

    LEAST_CONN

    The least request load balancer uses an O(1) algorithm which selects two random healthy hosts and picks the host which has fewer active requests.

    RANDOM

    The random load balancer selects a random healthy host. The random load balancer generally performs better than round robin if no health checking policy is configured.

    PASSTHROUGH

    This option will forward the connection to the original IP address requested by the caller without doing any form of load balancing. This option must be used with care. It is meant for advanced use cases. Refer to Original Destination load balancer in Envoy for further details.

    LocalityLoadBalancerSetting

    Locality-weighted load balancing allows administrators to control the distribution of traffic to endpoints based on the localities of where the traffic originates and where it will terminate. These localities are specified using arbitrary labels that designate a hierarchy of localities in {region}/{zone}/{sub-zone} form. For additional detail refer to Locality Weight The following example shows how to setup locality weights mesh-wide.

    Given a mesh with workloads and their service deployed to “us-west/zone1/” and “us-west/zone2/”. This example specifies that when traffic accessing a service originates from workloads in “us-west/zone1/”, 80% of the traffic will be sent to endpoints in “us-west/zone1/”, i.e the same zone, and the remaining 20% will go to endpoints in “us-west/zone2/”. This setup is intended to favor routing traffic to endpoints in the same locality. A similar setting is specified for traffic originating in “us-west/zone2/”.

    1. distribute:
    2. - from: us-west/zone1/*
    3. to:
    4. "us-west/zone1/*": 80
    5. "us-west/zone2/*": 20
    6. - from: us-west/zone2/*
    7. to:
    8. "us-west/zone1/*": 20

    If the goal of the operator is not to distribute load across zones and regions but rather to restrict the regionality of failover to meet other operational requirements an operator can set a ‘failover’ policy instead of a ‘distribute’ policy.

    The following example sets up a locality failover policy for regions. Assume a service resides in zones within us-east, us-west & eu-west this example specifies that when endpoints within us-east become unhealthy traffic should failover to endpoints in any zone or sub-zone within eu-west and similarly us-west should failover to us-east.

    1. failover:
    2. - from: us-east
    3. to: eu-west
    4. - from: us-west
    5. to: us-east

    Locality load balancing settings.

    FieldTypeDescriptionRequired
    distribute

    Optional: only one of distribute or failover can be set. Explicitly specify loadbalancing weight across different zones and geographical locations. Refer to Locality weighted load balancing If empty, the locality weight is set according to the endpoints number within it.

    No
    failover

    Optional: only failover or distribute can be set. Explicitly specify the region traffic will land on when endpoints in local region becomes unhealthy. Should be used together with OutlierDetection to detect unhealthy endpoints. Note: if no OutlierDetection specified, this will not take effect.

    No

    LocalityLoadBalancerSetting.Distribute

    Describes how traffic originating in the ‘from’ zone or sub-zone is distributed over a set of ‘to’ zones. Syntax for specifying a zone is {region}/{zone}/{sub-zone} and terminal wildcards are allowed on any segment of the specification. Examples: * - matches all localities us-west/* - all zones and sub-zones within the us-west region us-west/zone-1/* - all sub-zones within us-west/zone-1

    FieldTypeDescriptionRequired
    fromstring

    Originating locality, ‘/’ separated, e.g. ‘region/zone/sub_zone’.

    No
    tomap<string, uint32>

    Map of upstream localities to traffic distribution weights. The sum of all weights should be == 100. Any locality not assigned a weight will receive no traffic.

    No

    Specify the traffic failover policy across regions. Since zone and sub-zone failover is supported by default this only needs to be specified for regions when the operator needs to constrain traffic failover so that the default behavior of failing over to any endpoint globally does not apply. This is useful when failing over traffic across regions would not improve service health or may need to be restricted for other reasons like regulatory controls.

    OutlierDetection

    A Circuit breaker implementation that tracks the status of each individual host in the upstream service. Applicable to both HTTP and TCP services. For HTTP services, hosts that continually return 5xx errors for API calls are ejected from the pool for a pre-defined period of time. For TCP services, connection timeouts or connection failures to a given host counts as an error when measuring the consecutive errors metric. See Envoy’s outlier detection for more details.

    The following rule sets a connection pool size of 100 HTTP1 connections with no more than 10 req/connection to the “reviews” service. In addition, it sets a limit of 1000 concurrent HTTP2 requests and configures upstream hosts to be scanned every 5 mins so that any host that fails 7 consecutive times with a 502, 503, or 504 error code will be ejected for 15 minutes.

    FieldTypeDescriptionRequired
    consecutiveErrorsint32

    Number of errors before a host is ejected from the connection pool. Defaults to 5. When the upstream host is accessed over HTTP, a 502, 503, or 504 return code qualifies as an error. When the upstream host is accessed over an opaque TCP connection, connect timeouts and connection error/failure events qualify as an error.

    No
    interval

    Time interval between ejection sweep analysis. format: 1h/1m/1s/1ms. MUST BE >=1ms. Default is 10s.

    No
    baseEjectionTimeDurationNo
    maxEjectionPercentint32

    Maximum % of hosts in the load balancing pool for the upstream service that can be ejected. Defaults to 10%.

    No
    minHealthPercentint32

    Outlier detection will be enabled as long as the associated load balancing pool has at least minhealthpercent hosts in healthy mode. When the percentage of healthy hosts in the load balancing pool drops below this threshold, outlier detection will be disabled and the proxy will load balance across all hosts in the pool (healthy and unhealthy). The threshold can be disabled by setting it to 0%. The default is 0% as it’s not typically applicable in k8s environments with few pods per service.

    No

    Subset

    A subset of endpoints of a service. Subsets can be used for scenarios like A/B testing, or routing to a specific version of a service. Refer to VirtualService documentation for examples of using subsets in these scenarios. In addition, traffic policies defined at the service-level can be overridden at a subset-level. The following rule uses a round robin load balancing policy for all traffic going to a subset named testversion that is composed of endpoints (e.g., pods) with labels (version:v3).

    1. apiVersion: networking.istio.io/v1alpha3
    2. kind: DestinationRule
    3. name: bookinfo-ratings
    4. spec:
    5. host: ratings.prod.svc.cluster.local
    6. trafficPolicy:
    7. loadBalancer:
    8. simple: LEAST_CONN
    9. subsets:
    10. - name: testversion
    11. labels:
    12. version: v3
    13. trafficPolicy:
    14. loadBalancer:
    15. simple: ROUND_ROBIN

    Note: Policies specified for subsets will not take effect until a route rule explicitly sends traffic to this subset.

    One or more labels are typically required to identify the subset destination, however, when the corresponding DestinationRule represents a host that supports multiple SNI hosts (e.g., an egress gateway), a subset without labels may be meaningful. In this case a traffic policy with can be used to identify a specific SNI host corresponding to the named subset.

    FieldTypeDescriptionRequired
    namestring

    Name of the subset. The service name and the subset name can be used for traffic splitting in a route rule.

    Yes
    labelsmap<string, string>

    Labels apply a filter over the endpoints of a service in the service registry. See route rules for examples of usage.

    No
    trafficPolicyTrafficPolicy

    Traffic policies that apply to this subset. Subsets inherit the traffic policies specified at the DestinationRule level. Settings specified at the subset level will override the corresponding settings specified at the DestinationRule level.

    No

    TLSSettings

    SSL/TLS related settings for upstream connections. See Envoy’s TLS context for more details. These settings are common to both HTTP and TCP upstreams.

    For example, the following rule configures a client to use mutual TLS for connections to upstream database cluster.

    1. apiVersion: networking.istio.io/v1alpha3
    2. kind: DestinationRule
    3. metadata:
    4. name: db-mtls
    5. spec:
    6. host: mydbserver.prod.svc.cluster.local
    7. trafficPolicy:
    8. tls:
    9. mode: MUTUAL
    10. clientCertificate: /etc/certs/myclientcert.pem
    11. privateKey: /etc/certs/client_private_key.pem
    12. caCertificates: /etc/certs/rootcacerts.pem

    The following rule configures a client to use TLS when talking to a foreign service whose domain matches *.foo.com.

    1. apiVersion: networking.istio.io/v1alpha3
    2. kind: DestinationRule
    3. metadata:
    4. name: tls-foo
    5. spec:
    6. host: "*.foo.com"
    7. trafficPolicy:
    8. tls:
    9. mode: SIMPLE

    The following rule configures a client to use Istio mutual TLS when talking to rating services.

    FieldTypeDescriptionRequired
    mode

    Indicates whether connections to this port should be secured using TLS. The value of this field determines how TLS is enforced.

    Yes
    clientCertificatestring

    REQUIRED if mode is MUTUAL. The path to the file holding the client-side TLS certificate to use. Should be empty if mode is ISTIO_MUTUAL.

    No
    privateKeystring

    REQUIRED if mode is MUTUAL. The path to the file holding the client’s private key. Should be empty if mode is ISTIO_MUTUAL.

    No
    caCertificatesstring

    OPTIONAL: The path to the file containing certificate authority certificates to use in verifying a presented server certificate. If omitted, the proxy will not verify the server’s certificate. Should be empty if mode is ISTIO_MUTUAL.

    No
    subjectAltNamesstring[]

    A list of alternate names to verify the subject identity in the certificate. If specified, the proxy will verify that the server certificate’s subject alt name matches one of the specified values. If specified, this list overrides the value of subjectaltnames from the ServiceEntry.

    No
    snistring

    SNI string to present to the server during TLS handshake.

    No

    TLSSettings.TLSmode

    TLS connection mode

    NameDescription
    DISABLE

    Do not setup a TLS connection to the upstream endpoint.

    SIMPLE

    Originate a TLS connection to the upstream endpoint.

    MUTUAL

    Secure connections to the upstream using mutual TLS by presenting client certificates for authentication.

    ISTIO_MUTUAL

    Secure connections to the upstream using mutual TLS by presenting client certificates for authentication. Compared to Mutual mode, this mode uses certificates generated automatically by Istio for mTLS authentication. When this mode is used, all other fields in TLSSettings should be empty.

    TrafficPolicy

    Traffic policies to apply for a specific destination, across all destination ports. See DestinationRule for examples.

    FieldTypeDescriptionRequired
    loadBalancerLoadBalancerSettings

    Settings controlling the load balancer algorithms.

    No
    connectionPool

    Settings controlling the volume of connections to an upstream service

    No
    outlierDetectionOutlierDetection

    Settings controlling eviction of unhealthy hosts from the load balancing pool

    No
    tls

    TLS related settings for connections to the upstream service.

    No
    portLevelSettingsPortTrafficPolicy[]

    Traffic policies specific to individual ports. Note that port level settings will override the destination-level settings. Traffic settings specified at the destination-level will not be inherited when overridden by port-level settings, i.e. default values will be applied to fields omitted in port-level traffic policies.

    No

    Traffic policies that apply to specific ports of the service