DevOps
Intermediate
What is Canary Deployment?
A deployment strategy that gradually rolls out changes to a small subset of users before deploying to the entire infrastructure.
Named after canaries in coal mines, canary deployments expose new versions to a small percentage of traffic (e.g., 5%) while monitoring for errors. If metrics look good, traffic percentage increases gradually until 100%.
This catches issues that testing cannot — real user behavior, scale effects, and edge cases. Key metrics to monitor include error rates, latency, and business metrics. If problems appear, the canary is rolled back with minimal user impact.