Google Cloud announces Traffic Director, a networking management tool for service mesh

With each new set of technologies comes a new set of terms. In the containerized world, applications are broken down into discrete pieces or micro services. As these services proliferate, it creates a service mesh, a network of services and the interactions that take place as they interact. For each new technology like this, it requires a management layer, especially for the network administrators to understand and control the new concept, in this case, the service mesh.

Today at Google Cloud Next, the company announced the Beta of Traffic Director for open service mesh, specifically to help network managers understand what’s happening in their service mesh.

“To accelerate adoption and reduce the toil of managing service mesh, we’re excited to introduce Traffic Director, our new GCP-managed, enterprise-ready configuration and traffic control plane for service mesh that enables global resiliency, intelligent load balancing, and advanced traffic control capabilities like canary deployments,” Brad Calder, VP of engineering for technical infrastructure at Google Cloud, wrote in a blog post introducing the tool.

Traffic Director provides a way for operations to deploy a service mesh on their networks and have more control over how it works and interacts with the rest of the system. The tool works with Virtual Machines, Compute Engine on GCP, or in a containerized approach, GKE on GCP.

The product is just launching into Beta today, but the road map includes additional security features and support for hybrid environments, and eventually integration with Anthos, the hybrid management tool the company introduced yesterday at Google Cloud Next.

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