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 GitHubFebruary 1, 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