Smart Traffic Director
KubeSlice makes it easy to distribute applications to many different Kubernetes
clusters. When an instance of the same service is present in multiple clusters,
an anycast address is often associated with the service to direct traffic to the
nearest site. However, this approach does not take into account the loading of
the application at that site. To address this, we offer the combination of
Dynamic Traffic Director and Avesha's enhanced external-DNS combined in a product
called as Smart Traffic Director. With these tools, you can configure the distribution of
traffic to your services based on the loading of the application at each site, ensuring that
your users always have the best possible experience.
Smart Traffic Director (SmTD) provides intelligent traffic routing for applications deployed on clusters in varied locations that share a common DNS name. It helps distribute traffic directed toward those applications by informing DNS providers of the multiple IP addresses from each cluster at which the services can be reached.
SmTD updates DNS weights based on annotations with its micro services listed below:
- Dynamic Traffic Controller
- ExternalDNS
Dynamic Traffic Controller is a microservice that ingests metrics to make intelligent DNS weight updates that causes intelligent traffic routing. Higher weights indicate a greater ability for the service at a given site to handle/process incoming transactions.
ExternalDNS is another microservice of SmTD. It advertises IP address to DNS-name relationships to a DNS provider for those services in its cluster that have been annotated to signal their name/address through ExternalDNS.
The following topology figure shows how SmTD offers dynamic network traffic to the DNS providers.
Benefits
- The Dynamic Traffic Controller (DTC) automatically updates the
weightattribute of services when it is enabled on in the cluster. - Avesha's ExternalDNS is an enhanced version of the open source ExternalDNS. It will provide a service's IP address and DNS name to a DNS provider.
- Our enhanced ExternalDNS supports StackPath along with numerous DNS Providers.
Limitations
- Multi-cluster same-hostname services are limited to only the NS1 and the StackPath DNS providers.
- Load balancing based on the weights provided by the DTC is only supported by the NS1 DNS provider.