Traffic Coloring in Microservice Architecture: Concepts, Applications, and Implementation
Traffic coloring tags each request in a microservice call chain, propagating a version label through HTTP headers or RPC contexts so that routers and load balancers can perform gray releases, blue‑green deployments, lane isolation, graceful shutdowns, and test traffic separation, provided all services support the metadata propagation via frameworks such as Spring Cloud Ribbon or Dubbo.
