Zhuxi Zhu developed degraded-host deprioritization in Envoy’s load balancing, contributing to the envoyproxy/envoy repository. By integrating outlier detection with the x-envoy-degraded header, Zhuxi enabled hosts marked as degraded to be deprioritized in load balancing decisions while remaining in rotation, improving reliability and latency during partial failures. The implementation aligned degrade and undegrade logic with existing ejection mechanisms, maintaining consistent backoff semantics. Zhuxi expanded test coverage with unit and integration tests, updated API and admin schemas to support degraded-state handling, and provided comprehensive documentation and release notes. The work demonstrated depth in backend development, C++, and network programming.