Health is an important aspect of a microservice architecture. Kong Mesh can use health status to select endpoints for communication between dataplane proxies. Orchestrators, such as Kubernetes, use service health status to manage container lifecycles. Also, users want the service state to be observable through the GUI or CLI.
Kong Mesh supports several mechanisms to regulate traffic depending on the health of a service:
A passive Kong Mesh policy which configures a dataplane proxy to monitor its existing mesh traffic in order to evaluate dataplane health. The dataplane can be configured to respond to a widely configurable range of errors and events that it may detect in communication with remote endpoints.
Configuration of centralized health probing of services, either directly by Kong Mesh Control Plane, or by the underlying platform, such as Kubernetes. These can detect problems from the Control Plane’s perspective, and propagate failures to the entire mesh. However, it is necessary for the Control Plane to be available, unlike policies which operate independently on the dataplane itself.
An active Kong Mesh policy which configures a dataplane proxy to send extra traffic to other dataplane proxies in order to evaluate their health. The amount of extra traffic for all dataplane proxies to actively probe each other grows quickly for large meshes. In some meshes, Health Check can be useful for specific routes which are not frequently traversed, but still need to detect failures quickly.