Possible to disable/inactivate a backend using VCL?

[Batanun B]

Hi,

We are currently working on a new feature that won't go live for several months still. This new feature has it's own backend in Varnish. Most of our VCL code is identical for all environments, and this code refers to the new backend, so it needs to be defined otherwise Varnish won't start. But in production we don't want to show anything of this feature. And we would like to have this backend completely disabled or inactivated in Varnish. Can we do that using VCL? Like forcing the health to be sick, or something similar. We would prefer to keep this inside the backend declaration if possible, and we would also prefer somethink not too "hackish" (like pointing it to a dead IP).

Does Varnish has any recommended approach for this? I know there is a cli command to set the health, but as I said we would really prefer doing this using VCL only.
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