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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

Artifact
A packaged, versioned output of a build process — such as a Docker image, JAR file, or compiled binary — ready for deployment.
Continuous Deployment
A practice where every code change that passes automated tests is automatically deployed to production.
Runbook
A documented set of standardized procedures for handling routine operations and incident response in production systems.
Helm
A package manager for Kubernetes that simplifies deploying and managing applications using reusable, configurable charts.
SRE (Site Reliability Engineering)
An engineering discipline that applies software engineering principles to infrastructure and operations to create reliable systems.
Terraform
An open-source tool for provisioning and managing cloud infrastructure using declarative configuration files.
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