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Istio Resilience: Circuit Breakers & Retries

Automatic retries, timeouts, circuit breakers, and outlier detection to build fault-tolerant microservices with Istio.

🎯Key Takeaways
Retries: configure in VirtualService (attempts, retryOn conditions)
Timeouts: configure per route in VirtualService
Circuit breaker: outlierDetection in DestinationRule (eject unhealthy hosts)

Istio Resilience: Circuit Breakers & Retries

Automatic retries, timeouts, circuit breakers, and outlier detection to build fault-tolerant microservices with Istio.

~1 min read
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What you'll learn
  • Retries: configure in VirtualService (attempts, retryOn conditions)
  • Timeouts: configure per route in VirtualService
  • Circuit breaker: outlierDetection in DestinationRule (eject unhealthy hosts)

Resilience Without Code Changes

Istio DestinationRules configure circuit breaking (outlier detection: eject hosts returning 5xx errors) and VirtualService configures retries (attempts, retryOn conditions) and timeouts. No application code changes needed — the proxy handles it transparently.

Key takeaways

  • Retries: configure in VirtualService (attempts, retryOn conditions)
  • Timeouts: configure per route in VirtualService
  • Circuit breaker: outlierDetection in DestinationRule (eject unhealthy hosts)

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