Virtual machines: Traffic Director solves application networking for VM-based workloads alongside Kubernetes-based workloads. You simply add a flag to your Compute Engine VM instance template, and Google seamlessly handles the infrastructure set up, which includes installing and configuring the proxies that deliver application networking capabilities.

As an example, traffic enters your deployment through External HTTP(S) Load Balancing to a service in the Kubernetes cluster in one region and can then be routed to another service on a VM in a totally different region.

gRPC: With Traffic Director, you can easily bring application networking capabilities such as service discovery, load balancing, and traffic management directly to your gRPC applications. This functionality happens natively in gRPC, so service proxies are not required — that’s why they’re called proxy-less gRPC applications. For more information, refer to Traffic Director and gRPC — proxyless services for your service mesh.