Configure Istio traffic management including routing, load balancing, circuit breakers, and canary deployments. Use when implementing service mesh traffic policies, progressive delivery, or resilience patterns.
View on GitHubwshobson/agents
cloud-infrastructure
January 19, 2026
Select agents to install to:
npx add-skill https://github.com/wshobson/agents/blob/main/plugins/cloud-infrastructure/skills/istio-traffic-management/SKILL.md -a claude-code --skill istio-traffic-managementInstallation paths:
.claude/skills/istio-traffic-management/# Istio Traffic Management
Comprehensive guide to Istio traffic management for production service mesh deployments.
## When to Use This Skill
- Configuring service-to-service routing
- Implementing canary or blue-green deployments
- Setting up circuit breakers and retries
- Load balancing configuration
- Traffic mirroring for testing
- Fault injection for chaos engineering
## Core Concepts
### 1. Traffic Management Resources
| Resource | Purpose | Scope |
| ------------------- | ----------------------------- | ------------- |
| **VirtualService** | Route traffic to destinations | Host-based |
| **DestinationRule** | Define policies after routing | Service-based |
| **Gateway** | Configure ingress/egress | Cluster edge |
| **ServiceEntry** | Add external services | Mesh-wide |
### 2. Traffic Flow
```
Client → Gateway → VirtualService → DestinationRule → Service
(routing) (policies) (pods)
```
## Templates
### Template 1: Basic Routing
```yaml
apiVersion: networking.istio.io/v1beta1
kind: VirtualService
metadata:
name: reviews-route
namespace: bookinfo
spec:
hosts:
- reviews
http:
- match:
- headers:
end-user:
exact: jason
route:
- destination:
host: reviews
subset: v2
- route:
- destination:
host: reviews
subset: v1
---
apiVersion: networking.istio.io/v1beta1
kind: DestinationRule
metadata:
name: reviews-destination
namespace: bookinfo
spec:
host: reviews
subsets:
- name: v1
labels:
version: v1
- name: v2
labels:
version: v2
- name: v3
labels:
version: v3
```
### Template 2: Canary Deployment
```yaml
apiVersion: networking.istio.io/v1beta1
kind: VirtualService
metadata:
name: my-service-canary
spec:
hosts:
- my-service
http:
- route:
- destinati