What do you mean by multi-cluster support? 🔗︎
Backyards helps you manage multi-cluster service meshes in three different layers.
- First, multi-cluster meshes can easily be built using the Backyards CLI, avoiding the need to manually manage complex Istio configurations on all of the clusters.
- Second, our Istio distribution contains important changes from upstream Istio to collect cluster-aware metrics.
- Third, multi-cluster support is natively built in the Backyards dashboard and CLI. They are able to display and seamlessly manage services across clusters with a shared Istio control plane.
Can you add clusters dynamically? 🔗︎
Yes, attaching and detaching clusters from a service mesh can easily be done through the Backyards CLI. These CLI commands are backed by the Istio operator that manages remote clusters through Kubernetes custom resources and secrets that hold the Kubeconfigs of those clusters.
What are some key multi-cluster use-cases? 🔗︎
Perhaps the most common use case for a multi-cluster service mesh is to connect on-premises and cloud environments easily. For example, using a multi-cluster mesh you can securely connect your cloud services to the legacy services running in on-prem clusters.
Public clouds are also often used to scale out from an on-premises datacenter during particular events when your services need to handle an increased load.
Some common load balancing and high availability patterns can easily be implemented using a multi-cluster mesh as well. You can have multiple clusters in different regions using locality-based load balancing, and driving traffic to another region during a failure event in a specific region.
