Canary Deployment

Canary deployment is a release strategy used to reduce risk when rolling out new software versions in production. It involves slowly rolling out a change to a subset of users before rolling it out to the entire infrastructure.

The process involves deploying the new software version (the canary) to a small percentage of users first. The canary deployment is monitored closely for any issues. If no problems are detected, it is gradually rolled out to larger portions of users. This minimizes downtime and potential disruptions from software bugs or issues. Key metrics like resource utilization, response times, and error rates are monitored at each stage. If any issues arise at any point, the deployment can be rolled back and the problem addressed before subjecting all users to the faulty update. The canary deployment allows detecting bugs early with minimal impact. It enables incremental testing and provides an additional control mechanism when releasing new software.