The Fine Art of Canary Deployments

Categories: Canary Canary Deployments Deployment Blue-Green Deployment Kubernetes

Canary Deployments are the last ingredient of any Continuous Delivery or Continuous Deployment rollout. A canary deployment is a deployment strategy that releases an application or service incrementally to a subset of users. All infrastructure in a target environment is updated in small phases (e.g., 2%, 25%, 75%, 100%). This control makes a canary release the lowest risk-prone compared to all other deployment strategies, like the blue-green strategy. If you need to back out of a production deployment quickly without much disruption, then canary deployments may be an excellent practice to set up.

We will treat this talk like a recipe so that you can set up a canary in your work environment.

  • Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, Continuous Deployment Overview

  • You can perform this anywhere: Cloud instances or Kubernetes

  • What is Canary? What are some of the strategies you can use?

  • What CD Frameworks perform Canary Deployments?

  • How do you perform metrics? Are things going too slow or too fast?

  • How do you back out if this rollout is not performing as well as it should?

  • Can you perform canary deployments without a CD framework? Perhaps something native to Kubernetes?

  • Conclusion