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istio-traffic-management

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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.

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wshobson/agents

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wshobson/agents
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plugins/cloud-infrastructure/skills/istio-traffic-management/SKILL.md

Last Verified

January 19, 2026

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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-management

Installation paths:

Claude
.claude/skills/istio-traffic-management/
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Instructions

# 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

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