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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

Observability
The ability to understand a system's internal state from its external outputs through metrics, logs, and traces.
Artifact
A packaged, versioned output of a build process — such as a Docker image, JAR file, or compiled binary — ready for deployment.
Semantic Versioning
A versioning scheme using MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH numbers that communicates the nature of changes in each release.
Chaos Engineering
The discipline of deliberately introducing failures into a system to test its resilience and identify weaknesses before they cause outages.
Docker Compose
A tool for defining and running multi-container Docker applications using a YAML configuration file.
Pipeline as Code
Defining CI/CD pipeline configurations as version-controlled code files rather than through UI-based pipeline builders.
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