Traffic Shifting/Splitting

    Envoy’s router can split traffic to a route in a virtual host across two or more upstream clusters. There are two common use cases.

    1. Version upgrades: traffic to a route is shifted gradually from one cluster to another. The section describes this scenario in more detail.

    2. A/B testing or multivariate testing: of the same service are tested simultaneously. The traffic to the route has to be split between clusters running different versions of the same service. The traffic splitting section describes this scenario in more detail.

    Envoy matches routes with a policy. If the route has a runtime_fraction object, the request will be additionally matched based on the runtime_fraction value (or the default, if no value is specified). Thus, by placing routes back-to-back in the above example and specifying a runtime_fraction object in the first route, traffic shifting can be accomplished by changing the runtime_fraction value. The following are the approximate sequence of actions required to accomplish the task.

    1. In the beginning, set routing.traffic_shift.helloworld to 100, so that all requests to the helloworld virtual host would match with the v1 route and be served by the helloworld_v1 cluster.

    2. To start shifting traffic to helloworld_v2 cluster, set routing.traffic_shift.helloworld to values 0 < x < 100. For instance at 90, 1 out of every 10 requests to the helloworld virtual host will not match the v1 route and will fall through to the v2 route.

    3. Gradually decrease the value set in so that a larger percentage of requests match the v2 route.

    Traffic splitting across multiple upstreams

    Consider the helloworld example again, now with three versions (v1, v2 and v3) instead of two. To split traffic evenly across the three versions (i.e., 33%, 33%, 34%), the weighted_clusters option can be used to specify the weight for each upstream cluster.

    Unlike the previous example, a single entry is sufficient. The weighted_clusters configuration block in a route can be used to specify multiple upstream clusters along with weights that indicate the percentage of traffic to be sent to each upstream cluster.

    1. virtual_hosts:
    2.    - name: www2
    3.      domains:
    4.      - '*'
    5.      routes:
    7.          route:
    8.              runtime_key_prefix: routing.traffic_split.helloworld
    9.              clusters:
    10.                - name: helloworld_v1
    11.                  weight: 33
    12.                - name: helloworld_v2
    13.                  weight: 33
    14.                - name: helloworld_v3

    By default, the weights must sum to exactly 100. In the V2 API, the defaults to 100, but can be modified to allow finer granularity.

    The weights assigned to each cluster can be dynamically adjusted using the following runtime variables: routing.traffic_split.helloworld.helloworld_v1, routing.traffic_split.helloworld.helloworld_v2 and .