Traffic Director Cloud Service Mesh
Legacy names Traffic Director, Anthos Service Mesh, ASM
Managed service mesh for traffic management, mTLS security, and observability across GKE and Compute Engine.
Naming timeline
- Traffic Director
Launched as Google Cloud's global traffic management control plane for service mesh and proxyless gRPC.
- Anthos Service Mesh
Launched as an Istio-powered managed service mesh under the Anthos umbrella.
- Cloud Service MeshCurrent name
Anthos Service Mesh and Traffic Director converged into a single unified product: Cloud Service Mesh.
What is Traffic Director called now?
Traffic Director was consolidated into Cloud Service Mesh, with the latest change on 23 May 2024 (Product Convergence). Earlier names covered by this entry also include Anthos Service Mesh, ASM. Managed service mesh for traffic management, mTLS security, and observability across GKE and Compute Engine. Only the customer-facing name changed; the underlying technical identifiers remain backward compatible.
Technical identifiers
Technical identifiers unchanged. Only the customer-facing product name changed; the APIs, CLI commands, IAM roles and Terraform resources below keep their legacy identifiers for backward compatibility.
| REST / gRPC APIs | networkservices.googleapis.com trafficdirector.googleapis.com mesh.googleapis.com gkehub.googleapis.com |
|---|---|
| gcloud / CLI Commands | gcloud container fleet mesh gcloud network-services |
| IAM Predefined Roles | roles/networkservices.* roles/trafficdirector.* roles/gkehub.* |
| Terraform Resources | google_network_services_mesh google_gke_hub_feature |
Traffic Director API (trafficdirector.googleapis.com) and GKE Hub mesh feature remain active; in-cluster istiod control plane on GKE was deprecated in September 2026 in favor of the Google-managed control plane.
Notes & disambiguation
- On May 23, 2024, Google Cloud converged Anthos Service Mesh (Istio-based service mesh for GKE fleets) and Traffic Director (global proxyless gRPC and Envoy control plane) into a single unified product: Cloud Service Mesh.
- Visiting cloud.google.com/traffic-director/docs redirects to docs.cloud.google.com/service-mesh/docs with the banner 'Anthos Service Mesh and Traffic Director are now Cloud Service Mesh.'
- Underlying APIs (trafficdirector.googleapis.com, networkservices.googleapis.com, mesh.googleapis.com) and fleet feature identifiers remain unchanged.
Sources & official documentation
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