Splitting Traffic between Services

Sometimes you might want to split the incoming traffic to a service between its different versions and/or external services. The various use cases for traffic splitting include but are not limited to:

• Splitting traffic between various versions.
• A/B Testing different versions of a service.
• Rolling upgrades.

To configure the splitting of service traffic, we need to set up some rules in the Rules tab of the Deployments section:

To add a routing rule for a service, click on the Add button besides its routing rules to open a form like this:

How it works?link

Each incoming request to an internal service is routed to one of the specified targets. A target can be a version of that service or an external host and is selected randomly based on the weight assigned to it.

As of now, you can split incoming to an external service on the basis of port only.

Example 1 (Splitting traffic between multiple versions of a service)link

Targets:

Target type	Version	Port	Weight
Internal service version	v1	8080	80
Internal service version	v2	8080	20

The above config splits the incoming traffic to a service between its 2 versions (v1 and v2). The splitting of traffic is random based on the weights. This means that roughly 80% of requests will go to v1 while 20% will go to v2.

Example 2 (Splitting traffic between internal versions of a service and an external host)link

Targets:

Target type	Version/Host	Port	Weight
Internal service version	Verson - v1	8080	50
Internal service version	Verson - v2	8081	30
External host	Host - example.com	5000	20

The above config helps us to route 50% of incoming service requests to its v1 version and 30% to its v2 version. While the rest 20% goes to an external host example.com.