Manual Traffic Routing
Manual traffic routing is a networking and system administration concept where administrators or developers explicitly configure how network traffic is directed between services, servers, or endpoints, rather than relying on automated or dynamic routing mechanisms. It involves setting up rules, policies, or configurations to control the flow of data, often for purposes like load balancing, failover, testing, or security. This approach provides fine-grained control but requires manual intervention for changes.
Developers should learn manual traffic routing when working in environments that demand precise control over traffic flow, such as in blue-green deployments, canary releases, or during debugging and testing phases where specific traffic needs to be directed to particular instances. It is also essential in legacy systems or scenarios where automated tools are unavailable or insufficient, allowing for custom routing logic to optimize performance, ensure high availability, or implement security measures like traffic filtering.