recall

← recall

canary pattern

Roll out a change to a small slice of traffic first; watch metrics; expand if healthy or roll back if not. The canary in the coal mine — a small population takes the risk first.

Roll out a change to a small slice of traffic first; watch metrics; expand if healthy or roll back if not. The canary in the coal mine — a small population takes the risk first.

symptoms

  • full deploys risk full-system outages
  • regressions only show under real traffic

causes

  • all-at-once deploys
  • no automated metric-based promotion

fixes

  • traffic-splitting at the LB or service mesh
  • automated promotion based on error/latency thresholds
  • automatic rollback on threshold breach

you might say

  • canary it
  • canary deployment
  • 1% rollout

related

aliases: canary release, progressive rollout

topics: deployment, operations

references: