Traffic Director
Toil-free traffic management for your service mesh
Fully managed service
Traffic Director is a Google-managed service: if there is a problem, our operators get paged, not yours. You don't have to worry about deploying and managing the control plane, which means your people can focus on your business.
Sophisticated traffic management made simple
Use Traffic Director to easily deploy everything from simple load balancing to advanced features like request routing and percentage-based traffic splitting.
Build resilient services
Keep your service up and running by deploying it across multiple regions as VMs or containers and use Traffic Director to deliver global load balancing with automatic cross-region overflow and failover.
Scale seamlessly with your deployment
Traffic Director is built to seamlessly handle growth in your deployments. As the number of services grows, Traffic Director seamlessly scales to manage all of them, even for large installations.
Modernize at your pace
Traffic Director works for both VM-based (Compute Engine) and containerized applications (Google Kubernetes Engine or self-managed Kubernetes) and can be incrementally introduced for your services.
Features
Traffic management for open service proxies
Traffic Director provides a Google Cloud-managed traffic management control plane for xDS-compliant open service proxies like Envoy.
Works with VMs and containers
Deploy your Traffic Director-managed VM service instances using the managed instance groups and your container instances using network endpoint groups.
Global load balancing
With Traffic Director, deploy your service instances in multiple regions for resiliency and reach while requiring only a single service IP. This means, for instance, that your GKE service can be in multiple clusters, with each cluster in a different region. If the instances closest to the user go down or are overloaded, traffic is seamlessly directed to another available instance.
Health checking at scale
Traffic Director provides Google Cloud-delivered health checking at scale. This offloads health checking from Envoy/service proxies to Google’s resilient systems, allowing you to scale health checks for deployments of all sizes. Plus, your instances themselves are not overwhelmed from mesh-sized health checks.
Traffic Control with request routing and rich traffic policies
Traffic Director supports advanced request routing features like traffic splitting, enabling use cases like canarying, url rewrites/redirects, fault injection, traffic mirroring, and advanced routing capabilities based on various header values, including cookies. Traffic Director also supports many advanced traffic policies with the inclusion of many load-balancing schemes, circuit breaking, and backend outlier detections.
Intelligent and rapid auto-scaling for your services
Traffic Director gives you demand-driven autoscaling, allowing you to pay only for what you use, while scaling up quickly and intelligently without having to reach your cloud provider and without any pre-warming requirements.
"Traffic Director makes it easier to bring the benefits of Envoy and service mesh to production environments. With Envoy providing a universal data plane, Traffic Director delivers a fully managed traffic control plane with an open interface to avoid lock-in. Traffic Director’s global load balancing and rich traffic control help reduce the toil of traffic management for both enterprise and cloud-native end-users."
– Matt Klein, Creator, Envoy Proxy
Technical Resources
Pricing
Please visit our pricing page for details.
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