Common technologies for east-west traffic control in modern networks, especially within data centers and cloud environments, include:
Software-Defined Networking (SDN): SDN decouples the control plane from the data plane, allowing centralized management of network traffic. This enables dynamic routing, policy enforcement, and traffic optimization between workloads.
Example: A Kubernetes cluster uses SDN to manage pod-to-pod communication, ensuring efficient east-west traffic flow.
Network Virtualization: This technology creates virtual networks overlaying physical infrastructure, isolating traffic and improving security.
Example: Virtual Extensible LAN (VXLAN) encapsulates Layer 2 traffic over Layer 3 networks, enabling scalable east-west communication in multi-tenant environments.
Microsegmentation: This security approach divides the network into smaller segments, restricting east-west traffic between workloads based on policies.
Example: A financial institution uses microsegmentation to isolate databases from application servers, reducing the attack surface.
Service Mesh: A dedicated infrastructure layer for handling service-to-service communication, providing observability, security, and traffic control.
Example: Istio, a popular service mesh, manages east-west traffic between microservices in a cloud-native application.
Firewalls (Next-Gen and Distributed): Advanced firewalls inspect and control east-west traffic at the network or workload level.
Example: A distributed firewall in a cloud environment enforces policies between virtual machines (VMs) without routing traffic through a central appliance.
For east-west traffic control in cloud environments, Tencent Cloud offers Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) with SDN capabilities, Tencent Cloud Container Network Interface (TC-CNI) for Kubernetes networking, and Tencent Cloud Security Group for microsegmentation. These services help manage and secure traffic between workloads efficiently.