What is OCI Traffic Management?

• A service to guide traffic to endpoints based on conditions like:
  • Endpoint health.
  • Geographic origin of DNS request.
• Configure policies to serve intelligent responses to DNS queries.
• Capabilities:
  • Failover based on endpoint health.
  • Load balance across resources.
  • Steer traffic to physically closest endpoint.

Components of OCI Traffic Management

• Steering Policy: Intelligent rules to control responses to DNS queries.
• Attachment:
  • Links steering policy to zone.
  • Max 1 attachment per DNS record type.
  • Attachment overrides DNS records, e.g., if DNS A record points domain to IP 1.2.3.4 & attached steering policy points domain to IP 2.3.4.5, policy wins.
• Rule:
  • Contained inside steering policy.
  • Filters DNS responses based on properties of DNS request.
• Answer: The DNS response.
• Template:
  • Predefined rule sequence for a policy type & its intended behavior.
  • eg FAILOVER template checks FILTER, HEALTH, PRIORITY & LIMIT rules.
• Case (like switch case):
  • Optionally included in rules.
  • Case = Condition + Action
  • Condition behavior:
    • Case with no caseCondition always matches.
    • Case with caseCondition matches when expression evaluates to true.
  • Rule behavior:
    • Rule with no cases is always evaluated with same config.
    • Rule with empty sequence of cases is always ignored.
    • Rule with cases behaves according to first matching case in sequence.

Limits of OCI Traffic Management

• 100 policies per tenant.
• 1K attachments per tenant.

Types of Steering Policies in OCI Traffic Management

• Failover:
  • Uses Health Checks service to determine endpoint health.
  • If primary endpoint is unhealthy, fails over to secondary endpoint.
• Load Balancer:
  • Distributes traffic across multiple endpoints.
  • Assign weights to endpoints to control distribution.
    • Assign equal weights to distribute traffic evenly.
    • Unequal Weights = Ratio Load Balancing
    • e.g. if endpoint A has weight 1 & endpoint B has weight 2, one-third of incoming traffic is sent to A & two-thirds to B.
  • Health checks monitor endpoint health.
    • If an endpoint is unhealthy, traffic goes to others.
• Geolocation:
  • Direct traffic based on location of end user.
  • You can define geographic regions & endpoint(s) for each region.
  • Geographic regions are composed of originating continent, countries & states/provinces (North America).
• ASN: Steer based on Autonomous System Numbers.
• IP Prefix: Steer based on IP prefix of caller.

Traffic Steering Scenarios in OCI Traffic Management

• Failover: Automate failover between primary & secondary servers.
• Cloud Migration: Use weighted load balancing to gradually migrate traffic from data center to OCI.
• Load Balancing for Scale: Distribute traffic across (health checked) server pools.
• Hybrid Environments: Distribute traffic across OCI, data center, other clouds (AWS, Azure, GCP) & public resources on the internet.
• Worldwide Geolocation:
  • Divide global users into geographic regions & steer them to specific resources.
  • Supports “ring fencing” e.g. keep traffic from China in China & block traffic from outside China into China.
• Canary Testing: Determine internal users using IP prefix & serve them differently than external users.
• Zero-Rating Services: Determine originating enterprise, mobile operator, etc using ASN & serve them according to commercial agreements you may have.