Traffic Manager

A traffic manager service/tool sits between clients and services. It is responsible to redirect API calls to the appropriate Geo Region, DataCenter (DC), server, etc.

Techniques to send traffic from one place to another:

• Failover: Happens when a place that is supposed to attend traffic is down. Can happen a different levels:

  • A server(s) is down in the same DC -> Moves traffic to other available machines within the DC.
  • Entire DC is down -> Moves traffic to a complete different DC, usually within the same Geo. Example: US West is down, move traffic to East US.
  • Entire Geo is down -> Moves traffic to a different geo location. Example: All DC's in US are down, move traffic to Europe.

• Spillover: Happens when a place receiving traffic is really busy attending it, so a portion of the traffic gets redirected to another machine, DC, or even Geo location if needed.

Traffic can be send to a specific machine, DC, or Geo by the traffic manager manually by providing information of where the call should be routed to (via query param for example).