North-South vs East-West Traffic Separation¶

North-South vs East-West Traffic Separation is a network architectural pattern used in Service mesh environments like Istio. It distinguishes between traffic entering and leaving the data center (North-South) versus traffic flowing between services within the mesh (East-West).^[400-devops-07-monitoring-and-observability-k8s-istio-samples-multicluster-readme.md]

Traffic Separation¶

Separating these traffic types prevents resource contention and ensures stability. Specifically, a dedicated gateway deployment is used for East-West traffic to avoid "flooding" or overloading the default North-South Ingress gateway.^[400-devops-07-monitoring-and-observability-k8s-istio-samples-multicluster-readme.md]

East-West Gateway¶

In multicluster setups, the East-West Gateway acts as the dedicated entry point for inter-cluster or cross-network communication.^[400-devops-07-monitoring-and-observability-k8s-istio-samples-multicluster-readme.md]

The functionality of this gateway varies based on the configuration: * Primary-Remote: It is used to expose the control plane (istiod) from the primary cluster, allowing remote clusters to access it.^[400-devops-07-monitoring-and-observability-k8s-istio-samples-multicluster-readme.md] * Multi-network: It is used to expose services directly, enabling cross-cluster load balancing across different networks.^[400-devops-07-monitoring-and-observability-k8s-istio-samples-multicluster-readme.md]

Sources¶

^[400-devops-07-monitoring-and-observability-k8s-istio-samples-multicluster-readme.md]