Traffic Tainting Non-Idempotent Operations

When working with non-idempotent operations or operations where you do not want to commit changes during testing (e.g. to a database), you may want to consider using Traffic Tainting.

Let us say that you are consuming a billing API but you do not want actions done during local development to actually perform a billing operation, you could taint the traffic going up to the consumed service using metadata (e.g. HTTP Header x-is-tainted:true). You could then have the upstream Billing API service reply with a 200 but not actually perform the billing operation when the request is tainted.