Traffic Mirroring

Traffic mirroring, also called shadowing, is a powerful concept that provides a risk-free method of testing your releases in the production environment without impacting your end users.

Instead of using traditional pre-production environments which used to be a replica of production, mirroring can provide synthetic traffic to mimic the live environment.

Traffic monitoring works in the following way:

You deploy a new version of your component (v2)
The existing version (v1) works loke before but sends an asynchronous copy to the new version
The new version (v2) processes the incoming traffic but does not respond to the user (fire-and-forget)
The Dev and Ops teams can monitor the new version in order to identify potential problems before starting the rollout

Let’s start the Lab.

Create a Virtual Service that sends all traffic to v1 of the reviews service

apiVersion: networking.istio.io/v1alpha3
kind: VirtualService
metadata:
    name: reviews
spec:
    hosts:
    - reviews
    http:
    - route:

Run the following:

kubectl apply -f ./istio/samples/bookinfo/networking/virtual-service-all-v1.yaml

> virtualservice.networking.istio.io/reviews configured

Create a Virtual Service that sends all traffic to v1 and mirrors it to v2 of the reviews service

apiVersion: networking.istio.io/v1alpha3
kind: VirtualService
metadata:
    name: reviews
spec:
    hosts:
    - reviews
    http:
    - route:

Run the following:

kubectl apply -f ./istio/samples/bookinfo/networking/virtual-service-mirror-v1-v2.yaml

> virtualservice.networking.istio.io/reviews configured

After a short while you should see traffic starting to flow from reviews (v2) to ratings, because reviews (v2) is receiving the mirrored traffic.

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