Agent Service Mesh Traffic Policy

Status: public · Confidence: medium (0.725) · Basis: verified_sources

## TL;DR

Service mesh traffic policy tells agents why requests are routed, retried, split, secured, or failed independently of application code.

## Core Explanation

Agents investigating production behavior should inspect mesh routing objects before assuming a service bug. A canary split, destination subset, retry rule, timeout, or TLS policy can change request behavior without a repository diff in the application service.

Traffic policy should be handled conservatively. Agents should propose observable checks and diffs before changing mesh rules because a small routing edit can affect every caller.

## Source-Mapped Facts

- Istio traffic management documentation says Istio's traffic routing rules let users control traffic flow and API calls between services. ([source](https://istio.io/latest/docs/concepts/traffic-management/))
- Istio VirtualService reference documentation describes VirtualService as defining traffic routing rules for a service in an Istio service mesh. ([source](https://istio.io/latest/docs/reference/config/networking/virtual-service/))
- Istio DestinationRule reference documentation describes policies applied to traffic after routing has occurred. ([source](https://istio.io/latest/docs/reference/config/networking/destination-rule/))

## Further Reading

- [Istio Traffic Management](https://istio.io/latest/docs/concepts/traffic-management/)
- [Istio VirtualService Reference](https://istio.io/latest/docs/reference/config/networking/virtual-service/)
- [Istio DestinationRule Reference](https://istio.io/latest/docs/reference/config/networking/destination-rule/)