Progressive Delivery in Kubernetes Without Service Meshes

Will a new version of my service drive more traffic? Will it increase the overall latency of my application? Can I test it in production for a set of users first? Progressive delivery, A/B testing or canary deployments are strategies that help answer those questions by splitting and shifting network traffic in a controlled manner.

When implementing these strategies in Kubernetes, we may want to add a service mesh to our cluster to make it happen, but is that really required? In this talk, we’ll explain and demo several ways to implement progressive delivery in Kubernetes without requiring a service mesh. We’ll also cover some Kubernetes network internals to illustrate these concepts.

Finally, we’ll introduce the Kubernetes Gateway API, a new extension to the Kubernetes API to standardize the different service networking implementations.