After you add apps to your sidecar mesh, you can configure routing to and from the in-mesh apps, and set up specific traffic management rules to apply to request routing.

Get started with request routing

You can set up gateways to enable request routing, and use HTTPRoutes to determine how destinations are selected for traffic request to and from apps in your mesh.

Ingress gateways: To set up basic L4 routing to your apps, you can choose an ingress gateway from the available options in the Expose apps with an ingress gateway guide.

Egress gateways: To allow apps in your mesh to send traffic requests to an external service, follow the steps in Control traffic with an egress gateway.

East-west gateways (multicluster only): Start by using the Gloo Operator or Helm to create a multicluster mesh, which include steps to peer the cluster networks and deploy an east-west gateway to each cluster. The east-west gateways facilitate traffic routing across clusters in the mesh. For this reason, it is not recommended to apply any kind of routing logic or policies to east-west gateways. After you create the east-west gateways in a multicluster mesh, you can forget about them.

Get started with traffic management

After you set up destination selection with request routing, you can further modify how the traffic requests are routed to apps by defining routing rules in your HTTPRoutes. Consult the traffic management guides in the community Istio docs to see examples for traffic splitting, mirroring, redirects and rewrites, and more.