Tutorials System Design Tutorial
Traffic Routing Techniques — Complete Guide
Traffic Routing Techniques — Complete Guide: free step-by-step lesson with examples, common mistakes, and interview tips — part of System Design Tutorial on Toolliyo Academy.
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System Design Tutorial · Lesson 17 of 100
Traffic Routing Techniques
Basics → Scale → Interview
Basics · 1 — Building blocks · ~6 min · Module 2: Networking and Traffic Management
What is this?
Traffic routing sends subsets of requests to different versions or regions — canaries, blue/green, weighted, geo, header-based.
Why should you care?
ShopNest deploys should not flip 100% of checkout to a new build at once.
See it live — copy this example
Sketch the architecture on paper. These lessons focus on concepts and trade-offs.
Canary: 5% → orders-v2 , 95% → orders-v1
Blue/Green: switch LB target when green is healthy
Header: X-ShopNest-Canary:1 → v2
Geo: IN → Mumbai, EU → FrankfurtRun Example »
This lesson uses terminal or setup steps. Run commands on your computer — the live editor appears on coding lessons.
What happened?
- Canaries reduce blast radius.
- Blue/green needs double capacity briefly.
- Header routing helps internal testers.
- Geo routing cuts latency and can help compliance.
Practice next
- Design a 5% canary for Order service.
- List metrics that abort the canary (5xx, p95).
- Sketch blue/green for a weekend release.
- Weight traffic 10/90 then 50/50.
- Route staff accounts to v2 first.
Remember
Route to reduce deploy risk. Automate promote/abort. Match technique to risk level.
Orders canary
ShopNest sends 5% checkout to orders-v2.
Outcome: Error spike auto-aborts before full rollout.
Interview prep for this lesson
Practice these questions aloud after reading—each links to a full structured answer.
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