What does traffic shadowing refer to in production deployments?

What does traffic shadowing refer to in production deployments?

• A. Exposing new version to all users.
• B. Routing test data to a staging environment.
• C. Routing real user traffic in production to a new version for testing without exposing it to users.
• D. Shutting off production traffic.

Answer: (C)

Traffic shadowing is mirroring real production requests to a new version in parallel with the live system, so you can test and observe how the new version behaves under real load without impacting what users experience. The end-user traffic continues to go to the current production version, while a copy of each request is sent to the new version for testing and comparison. This lets you measure performance, errors, and data handling in production conditions before fully exposing the new version. It’s different from gradually routing some users to the new version (canary) because here the live user experience remains unchanged and the new version is evaluated in the background using real traffic.

Traffic shadowing is mirroring real production requests to a new version in parallel with the live system, so you can test and observe how the new version behaves under real load without impacting what users experience. The end-user traffic continues to go to the current production version, while a copy of each request is sent to the new version for testing and comparison. This lets you measure performance, errors, and data handling in production conditions before fully exposing the new version.

It’s different from gradually routing some users to the new version (canary) because here the live user experience remains unchanged and the new version is evaluated in the background using real traffic.