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Traffic Splitting

Traffic splitting enables gradual rollouts, canary deployments, and blue-green releases by distributing requests across multiple backends.

Use Cases​

  • Canary Deployments: Send small percentage to new version
  • Blue-Green: Switch between production environments
  • A/B Testing: Route traffic to different variants

Weighted Backends​

Configure multiple backends with weight distribution:

backends:
  - name: "stable"
    url: "http://api-v1.default.svc.cluster.local:8080"
    weight: 90
  - name: "canary"
    url: "http://api-v2.default.svc.cluster.local:8080"
    weight: 10

Weights are relative values. In this example:

  • 90% of traffic goes to stable (v1)
  • 10% of traffic goes to canary (v2)

Gradual Rollout Strategy​

  1. Start with 1-5% to canary
  2. Monitor error rates and latency
  3. Increase weight incrementally (10%, 25%, 50%)
  4. Complete rollout at 100%

Combine with health checks to automatically remove unhealthy backends from rotation.