Implementing Traffic Shadowing and Dark Launch in Modern API Gateways

Dark Launch is a strategy for incrementally releasing production-ready software features to groups of users, enabling real-time feedback and changes before wide launch. Traffic shadowing, duplicating incoming requests and sending them to the new feature without disrupting live traffic, can be achieved using an API Gateway like Edge Stack. Monitoring tools such as Prometheus help track critical metrics during this process. For mutable services that interact with third parties or persist state, dark launching requires disabling interaction with these components or replacing them with virtualized representations. Dark Launch is one approach among others, such as canary testing, to ensure a smooth feature release.