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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

Feature Flag
A technique that allows enabling or disabling features in production without deploying new code, enabling safe rollouts and A/B testing.
Grafana
An open-source analytics and visualization platform for creating dashboards from various data sources.
Pipeline as Code
Defining CI/CD pipeline configurations as version-controlled code files rather than through UI-based pipeline builders.
GitOps
A practice where Git repositories serve as the single source of truth for both application code and infrastructure configuration.
CI/CD
Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment — automated practices for building, testing, and deploying code changes.
Configuration Management
The practice of systematically managing and maintaining consistent server configurations across infrastructure.
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