Traffic, gateways, and service mesh

Kubernetes Services create stable discovery for changing Pods.

Traffic choices

• ClusterIP: internal virtual service.
• Headless Service: direct endpoint discovery.
• LoadBalancer Service: Layer 4 load balancing.
• Gateway API / Ingress: Layer 7 routing and Google Cloud load balancers.
• Multi Cluster Services/Ingress: selected fleet-wide discovery and traffic.

Use readiness gates and health checks so traffic reaches healthy Pods. Preserve client IP only when the requirement justifies configuration and trade-offs.

Gateway API

Gateway API separates infrastructure ownership from application routes. A platform team can own Gateway classes and shared gateways while application teams own permitted HTTPRoutes. This is usually clearer than letting every namespace create unrelated load balancers.

Service mesh

A mesh can add mutual TLS, traffic policy, telemetry, and service identity. Cloud Service Mesh can manage parts of this. A mesh also adds proxies or ambient components, policy, upgrades, latency, resource use, and debugging complexity. Adopt it for explicit cross-service requirements, not because microservices exist.

Resilience

Use timeouts, bounded retries, circuit breaking, load shedding, graceful degradation, and idempotency in the application and traffic layer. Do not allow multiple retry layers to multiply requests.