Reference · Glossary

Traffic drain

Gradually **stop sending new requests** to unhealthy or retiring instances before shutdown or deploy.

#When to use

Blue-green deploys, rolling updates, and pods failing readiness checks.

#When not to

Instant hard kills on long-running batch jobs — use graceful shutdown with timeouts.

#Example

Load balancer marks pod not ready; existing streams finish within 30s while new chat requests route elsewhere.