Subject: SAP Kyma
In modern cloud-native architectures, managing service-to-service communication efficiently and securely is crucial. SAP Kyma leverages a powerful service mesh to provide advanced traffic management capabilities, enabling developers and administrators to control, observe, and secure the flow of traffic between microservices seamlessly.
This article explores how traffic management works within Kyma’s service mesh and provides guidance on configuring it to optimize application performance, reliability, and security.
A service mesh is an infrastructure layer that manages service-to-service communication in a microservices architecture. SAP Kyma integrates Istio, a leading open-source service mesh, to handle:
By abstracting these networking concerns away from application code, Kyma enables teams to focus on business logic while maintaining control over communications.
Kyma allows you to route requests between different service versions or instances dynamically. This supports:
Service mesh automatically balances traffic across healthy service instances, improving availability and response times.
Simulate failures and define circuit breakers to prevent cascading failures:
Configure retry policies and timeouts to improve reliability and user experience.
Enable mutual TLS to encrypt service-to-service traffic and authenticate peers, enhancing security.
Virtual Services specify how requests are routed within the mesh.
Example YAML to route traffic between two versions:
apiVersion: networking.istio.io/v1alpha3
kind: VirtualService
metadata:
name: my-service
spec:
hosts:
- my-service
http:
- route:
- destination:
host: my-service
subset: v1
weight: 80
- destination:
host: my-service
subset: v2
weight: 20
This configuration routes 80% of traffic to version v1 and 20% to version v2.
Destination Rules specify policies for subsets (service versions).
Example:
apiVersion: networking.istio.io/v1alpha3
kind: DestinationRule
metadata:
name: my-service
spec:
host: my-service
subsets:
- name: v1
labels:
version: v1
- name: v2
labels:
version: v2
Inject latency or errors to test fault tolerance:
apiVersion: networking.istio.io/v1alpha3
kind: VirtualService
metadata:
name: my-service-fault-injection
spec:
hosts:
- my-service
http:
- fault:
delay:
percentage:
value: 10
fixedDelay: 5s
route:
- destination:
host: my-service
subset: v1
This delays 10% of requests by 5 seconds.
Kyma’s service mesh can enforce mutual TLS to encrypt and authenticate traffic:
kubectl apply -f - <<EOF
apiVersion: security.istio.io/v1beta1
kind: PeerAuthentication
metadata:
name: default
namespace: default
spec:
mtls:
mode: STRICT
EOF
Kyma’s integration with Istio provides rich telemetry via Prometheus, Grafana, and Kiali dashboards, enabling:
Traffic management via Kyma’s service mesh empowers SAP developers and operators to control microservice communication with precision, reliability, and security. By leveraging Istio’s advanced capabilities, Kyma enables safe deployments, robust fault handling, and deep observability—crucial for running resilient cloud-native applications in the SAP landscape.
Implementing effective traffic management strategies with Kyma’s service mesh is a key step toward operational excellence and continuous innovation in enterprise environments.