The Drawbridge

What it is

The Drawbridge steers traffic across origin pools. Unhealthy backends are taken out of rotation automatically. Weighted pools and sticky sessions are built in.

Cloudflare analogue: Cloudflare Load Balancing. SLA 99.99% · p99 15ms. Admins add origins. Unhealthy origins are removed automatically.

• ▸Active health checks
• ▸Weighted pools
• ▸Session affinity
• ▸Automatic failover

How it works

Origins share traffic by weight, geo, least-outstanding, or failover.

Health checks run from the edge. Unhealthy origins drop out automatically.

Use cases

Concrete ways teams use this service on day one.

Set it up in the dashboard

Dashboard → Services → The Drawbridge. Add origins. Session affinity cookie if the app is sticky.

API

Control-plane: GET|POST|DELETE /api/v1/drawbridge/origins. Send Authorization: Bearer tz_live_YOUR_TOKEN.

Creates count against the plan quota. A 402 plan_limit means you are at the cap — upgrade or delete an unused resource.

curl -sS -X POST https://tinyzipper.com/api/v1/drawbridge/origins \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer tz_live_YOUR_TOKEN" \
  -H "Idempotency-Key: $(uuidgen)" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"name":"Origin Accra","address":"origin.example.com:443","weight":70}'

const res = await fetch("https://tinyzipper.com/api/v1/drawbridge/origins", {
  method: "GET",
  headers: {
    Authorization: `Bearer ${process.env.ZIPPER_TOKEN}`,
    "Content-Type": "application/json"
  }
});
const json = await res.json();
if (!res.ok) throw new Error(json.error ?? res.statusText);
console.log(json);

Tips

Free allows one origin. Starter allows three. Business is for real multi-origin.

• ▸SOC 2
• ▸ISO 27001

Runbook

Keep zipper-a and zipper-b in the origin pool. Failover is automatic. A third VPS joins as zipper-c.