Monitoring and automating recovery from AZ impairments in Amazon EKS with Istio and ARC Zonal Shift

This article discusses a comprehensive approach to monitoring and automating recovery from Availability Zone (AZ) impairments in Amazon EKS using Istio, Prometheus, Grafana, and Amazon Application Recovery Controller (ARC) zonal shift.

• Key solution components:
  • Istio service mesh for network observability
  • Prometheus for metrics collection
  • Grafana for visualization and alerting
  • ARC zonal shift for traffic redirection during AZ impairments
• Monitoring strategy involves:
  • Evaluating network responses from Istio sidecar proxies
  • Tracking server-side errors in different AZs
  • Creating Grafana dashboards and alerts
• Zonal shift process automatically:
  • Cordons nodes in the impaired AZ
  • Suspends AZ rebalancing
  • Removes Pod endpoints from unhealthy AZ
• Benefits include:
  • Improved application resilience
  • Automated traffic redirection
  • Minimal service disruption

The solution provides a robust mechanism for detecting and responding to AZ-level infrastructure issues in Kubernetes environments.