Traffic Director: Traffic management for open service mesh

sorry for the rant, just realized my gke microservices requires a minimum of $18/month each to be exposed externally..

Probably per GB with tens of dollars per month fixed, same as AWS Global Accelerator.

Kind of. It's only the traffic management part, i.e. the external load balancer. It seems to be a mix of a managed Istio Pilot plus a bunch of stuff from GCLB: anycast, backend subsetting (Envoy does not do the health checking), etc. TD just tells each client which servers to talk to. It doesn't forward traffic. And it doesn't seem to be responsible for injecting the sidecars in clients.

From documentation:

Traffic Director delivers a GCP-managed Pilot along with additional capabilities such as global load balancing and centralized health checking. However, note that Traffic Director cannot be configured using Istio APIs in this Beta release; you can use GCP APIs for configuration. Both Traffic Director and Pilot use open standard APIs (xDS v2) to communicate with service proxies.

GCP has had global load balancing for a while now, which IIRC is anycast based. This is more their equivalent of App Mesh.