Traffic Management
Traffic management is a set of practices and technologies used to control, monitor, and optimize the flow of network traffic, particularly in web applications and distributed systems. It involves techniques like load balancing, rate limiting, circuit breaking, and traffic routing to ensure reliability, performance, and security. This concept is crucial for handling high volumes of requests, preventing downtime, and managing resources efficiently in modern software architectures.
Developers should learn traffic management when building scalable, resilient applications that handle variable or high traffic loads, such as e-commerce sites, APIs, or microservices. It's essential for preventing overloads, ensuring fair resource usage, and implementing failover strategies, which improves user experience and system stability. Use cases include distributing requests across servers, protecting against DDoS attacks, and enabling canary deployments or A/B testing.