Canary deployment
A canary deployment releases a new version to a small share of production traffic first, increasing that share only if measured health stays within threshold.
What is canary deployment?
A canary deployment releases a new version to a small share of production traffic first, increasing that share only if measured health stays within threshold.
Plain and technical
Rather than switching everyone to a new version at once, you send a small slice of real traffic to it and watch. If it behaves, more traffic follows. If it does not, only the slice was affected.
A canary requires traffic splitting, either through weighted routing or replica-count proportioning, and an automated gate evaluating success rate, latency percentiles and error signals. The gate should compare the canary against the concurrent stable version rather than against an absolute threshold, so a degraded shared dependency does not block a good release.
What it looks like in practice
Nearby vocabulary
Blue/green deployment
A blue/green deployment runs the new version as a parallel environment, verifies it, then switches all traffic at once. Reverting is the same switch back.
Continuous delivery
Continuous delivery is the practice of keeping software in a state where any change that has passed verification could be released to production at any time.
How DevOpsArk handles canary deployment
More definitions
See these concepts in a running system
A 30-minute walkthrough against your own infrastructure rather than a slide about the theory.