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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.

Related Terms

SRE (Site Reliability Engineering)
An engineering discipline that applies software engineering principles to infrastructure and operations to create reliable systems.
Kubernetes
An open-source container orchestration platform that automates deploying, scaling, and managing containerized applications.
Istio
An open-source service mesh that provides traffic management, security, and observability for microservices on Kubernetes.
Artifact
A packaged, versioned output of a build process — such as a Docker image, JAR file, or compiled binary — ready for deployment.
Incident Management
The process of detecting, responding to, and resolving service disruptions to minimize impact and restore normal operations.
Infrastructure Drift
The divergence between the actual state of infrastructure and its defined desired state, caused by manual changes or untracked modifications.
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