aster.cloud aster.cloud
  • /
  • Platforms
    • Public Cloud
    • On-Premise
    • Hybrid Cloud
    • Data
  • Architecture
    • Design
    • Solutions
    • Enterprise
  • Engineering
    • Automation
    • Software Engineering
    • Project Management
    • DevOps
  • Programming
    • Learning
  • Tools
  • About
  • /
  • Platforms
    • Public Cloud
    • On-Premise
    • Hybrid Cloud
    • Data
  • Architecture
    • Design
    • Solutions
    • Enterprise
  • Engineering
    • Automation
    • Software Engineering
    • Project Management
    • DevOps
  • Programming
    • Learning
  • Tools
  • About
aster.cloud aster.cloud
  • /
  • Platforms
    • Public Cloud
    • On-Premise
    • Hybrid Cloud
    • Data
  • Architecture
    • Design
    • Solutions
    • Enterprise
  • Engineering
    • Automation
    • Software Engineering
    • Project Management
    • DevOps
  • Programming
    • Learning
  • Tools
  • About
  • Platforms

Standardize Traffic Management: Service Directory And Traffic Director

  • aster.cloud
  • March 6, 2022
  • 4 minute read

Modern services are built on a mix of heterogeneous infrastructure platforms, and this mix is constantly changing as services migrate to the cloud to simplify operations. When you migrate services to the cloud, or move from legacy technologies to newer ones, it can involve a cumbersome reconfiguration of key components like load balancing and traffic management. We’re excited to launch the Preview of an integration between Service Directory and Traffic Director that will allow you to set up load balancing and traffic management on services in a consistent way across heterogeneous and evolving infrastructure.

Scenario: Moving services to the cloud

As an example, let’s say you’re at a company that has been running a payments service on-premises, and uses Traffic Director for traffic management. To simplify operational overhead, you’d like to move this service to Google Cloud and gradually migrate traffic over.


Partner with aster.cloud
for your next big idea.
Let us know here.



From our partners:

CITI.IO :: Business. Institutions. Society. Global Political Economy.
CYBERPOGO.COM :: For the Arts, Sciences, and Technology.
DADAHACKS.COM :: Parenting For The Rest Of Us.
ZEDISTA.COM :: Entertainment. Sports. Culture. Escape.
TAKUMAKU.COM :: For The Hearth And Home.
ASTER.CLOUD :: From The Cloud And Beyond.
LIWAIWAI.COM :: Intelligence, Inside and Outside.
GLOBALCLOUDPLATFORMS.COM :: For The World's Computing Needs.
FIREGULAMAN.COM :: For The Fire In The Belly Of The Coder.
ASTERCASTER.COM :: Supra Astra. Beyond The Stars.
BARTDAY.COM :: Prosperity For Everyone.

Doing this today requires managing distinct, infrastructure-specific configuration paths. You need to:

  • Configure one workflow to make the on-premises service available to Traffic Director
  • Configure another workflow to make the Google Cloud service available
  • Follow different steps depending on how the Google Cloud service is built (whether it runs on Compute Engine or Kubernetes Engine, for example)

The Service Directory and Traffic Director integration simplifies this, by allowing all of your services, regardless of the infrastructure they are built on, to be configured the same way. No matter whether your services are built on GCE, GKE, on-premises, or other clouds, Traffic Director just needs to know about their entry in Service Directory. In the following sections, we’ll take a look at both Service Directory and Traffic Director, and how they work together to make this happen.

Read More  Step-By-Step Guide To Resolve DEADLINE_EXCEEDED Errors On Cloud Spanner

Service Directory: Manage all services from a central place

Service Directory is a central service registry that allows you to manage and track all your services, and their metadata, in one place, whether your services are hosted on Google Cloud, on-premises, or other clouds. Services of all kinds can be registered to Service Directory via an API call. Services fronted by load balancers and those running on Kubernetes Engine can be automatically synchronized to Service Directory, instead of having to manage orchestration around service registration yourself.

Traffic Director: Routing, Load Balancing, and Traffic Management

Traffic Director is Google Cloud’s fully managed traffic control plane for the next-gen managed load balancers as well as open service mesh. With Traffic Director, you can establish a zero-trust security posture along with high visibility into service-to-service communication across GKE clusters and VM instances. Traffic director enables global load balancing in multiple regions, integrates with health checking, and supports a number of advanced traffic management policies such as traffic mirroring for forensics, weight-based traffic splitting for service migration and canary deployments.

Service Directory and Traffic Director

As we saw in the scenario, configuring Traffic Director with a heterogeneous deployment requires you to understand the infrastructure each service is built on. Different types of service infrastructure can each require their own configuration path. Now, you have the option of making Traffic Director work directly with services registered in Service Directory, with one common configuration path for all services for a simplified experience.

The process to do so is simple:

  • Register a service, along with its endpoints and annotations in Service Directory. Registration can be done automatically for services fronted by load balancers or running on Kubernetes Engine.
  • Create a service binding that binds your Service Directory service to a Traffic Director backend service, using commands like this:
Read More  How Partners Can Maximize Their 2023 Opportunity With The Transformation Cloud

 

gcloud beta network-services service-bindings create my-service-binding --location global --service-directory-namespace=my-service-directory-namespace
--service-directory-region=my-service-directory-region
--service-directory-service=my-service-directory-service

gcloud beta compute backend-services update my-backend-service 
--global 
--service-bindings=my-service-bindings

 

  • The service is now available to Traffic Director. Traffic Director can route and apply traffic management policies to this service. In the example below, we are splitting traffic between the Google Cloud and on-premises versions of the payments service in our scenario.
  • The service binding process is exactly the same regardless of the technologies the service is built on. All you need to provide is the service’s entry in Service Directory.
  • When the service’s endpoint information changes in Service Directory, Traffic Director will automatically be made aware of the new endpoints, without having to be manually reconfigured. Similarly, if the service’s infrastructure changes (for example, if it’s migrated to a different technology), the service binding process remains exactly the same.

 

Some of the benefits of Service Directory and Traffic Director include:

  • Simplified API: Service Directory supports multiple services, such as services running on GKE, fronted by Internal TCP/UDP or HTTP(S) Load Balancers, Private Service Connect, and more. With Service Directory integration, all of these services are represented in Traffic Director with a simplified API construct called Service Binding which abstracts the status-quo granular backend representation from the platform administrator configuring Traffic Director. In the absence of Service Directory integration, that platform administrator needs to worry about different types of backends such as Network Endpoint Groups and Instance Groups depending on your infrastructure setup. The Service Binding API creates a standardized user experience and also helps in establishing clear boundaries between producers and consumers of services in the service mesh.
  • Automatic service registration for easy onboarding: As mentioned, many Google Cloud services, like those fronted by load balancers or running on GKE, can be automatically synchronized to Service Directory. This can allow you to quickly onboard services to Service Directory, and in turn to Traffic Director.
  • Respond easily to service changes: Service Directory automatically informs Traffic Director of changes in services. For example, if the IP of a service endpoint changes, Service Directory will convey the new state to Traffic Director without needing to reconfigure anything.
  • Make more services available to your service mesh: Because a Service Directory registry can contain services from any environment, many more services can be first-class members of your service mesh. This includes cross-organization or managed third party services via Private Service Connect, Google Cloud managed services, as well as on-premises and hybrid services.
Read More  Introducing Innovations In Google Workspace To Help Your Organization Thrive In Hybrid Work

To get started with Service Directory and Traffic Director in Preview, check out the documentation.

 

 

By: Ashwin Karthi Narayanaswamy (Software Engineer) and Abhijeet Kalyan (Product Manager)
Source: Google Cloud Blog


For enquiries, product placements, sponsorships, and collaborations, connect with us at [email protected]. We'd love to hear from you!

Our humans need coffee too! Your support is highly appreciated, thank you!

aster.cloud

Related Topics
  • Google Cloud
  • Networking
  • Service Director
  • Traffic Director
You May Also Like
Google Cloud and Smart Communications
View Post
  • Platforms
  • Technology

Smart Communications, Inc. Dials into Google Cloud AI to Help Personalize Digital Services for Filipinos

  • October 25, 2024
View Post
  • Platforms
  • Public Cloud

Empowering builders with the new AWS Asia Pacific (Malaysia) Region

  • August 30, 2024
Red Hat and Globe Telecoms
View Post
  • Platforms
  • Technology

Globe Collaborates with Red Hat Open Innovation Labs to Modernize IT Infrastructure for Greater Agility and Scalability

  • August 19, 2024
Huawei Cloud Cairo Region Goes Live
View Post
  • Cloud-Native
  • Computing
  • Platforms

Huawei Cloud Goes Live in Egypt

  • May 24, 2024
Asteroid
View Post
  • Computing
  • Platforms
  • Technology

Asteroid Institute And Google Cloud Identify 27,500 New Asteroids, Revolutionizing Minor Planet Discovery With Cloud Technology

  • April 30, 2024
IBM
View Post
  • Hybrid Cloud
  • Platforms

IBM To Acquire HashiCorp, Inc. Creating A Comprehensive End-to-End Hybrid Cloud Platform

  • April 24, 2024
View Post
  • Platforms
  • Technology

Canonical Delivers Secure, Compliant Cloud Solutions for Google Distributed Cloud

  • April 9, 2024
Redis logo
View Post
  • Platforms
  • Software

Redis Moves To Source-Available Licenses

  • April 2, 2024

Stay Connected!
LATEST
  • 1
    Pure Accelerate 2025: All the news and updates live from Las Vegas
    • June 18, 2025
  • 2
    ‘This was a very purposeful strategy’: Pure Storage unveils Enterprise Data Cloud in bid to unify data storage, management
    • June 18, 2025
  • What is cloud bursting?
    • June 18, 2025
  • 4
    There’s a ‘cloud reset’ underway, and VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 is a chance for Broadcom to pounce on it
    • June 17, 2025
  • What is confidential computing?
    • June 17, 2025
  • Oracle adds xAI Grok models to OCI
    • June 17, 2025
  • Fine-tune your storage-as-a-service approach
    • June 16, 2025
  • 8
    Advanced audio dialog and generation with Gemini 2.5
    • June 15, 2025
  • 9
    A Father’s Day Gift for Every Pop and Papa
    • June 13, 2025
  • 10
    Global cloud spending might be booming, but AWS is trailing Microsoft and Google
    • June 13, 2025
about
Hello World!

We are aster.cloud. We’re created by programmers for programmers.

Our site aims to provide guides, programming tips, reviews, and interesting materials for tech people and those who want to learn in general.

We would like to hear from you.

If you have any feedback, enquiries, or sponsorship request, kindly reach out to us at:

[email protected]
Most Popular
  • Google Cloud, Cloudflare struck by widespread outages
    • June 12, 2025
  • What is PC as a service (PCaaS)?
    • June 12, 2025
  • 3
    Crayon targets mid-market gains with expanded Google Cloud partnership
    • June 10, 2025
  • By the numbers: Use AI to fill the IT skills gap
    • June 11, 2025
  • 5
    Apple services deliver powerful features and intelligent updates to users this autumn
    • June 11, 2025
  • /
  • Technology
  • Tools
  • About
  • Contact Us

Input your search keywords and press Enter.