What is Canary Deployment?
Gradually rolling out a new version to a small percentage of users before full release.
A Canary Deployment sends a small percentage of traffic (e.g., 5%) to the new version while the rest continues on the old version. Metrics are observed — error rate, latency, conversion rate — and if they look good, traffic is gradually shifted to 100%. If something breaks, only a small fraction of users are impacted. In Kubernetes, this is implemented with Istio VirtualService weighted routing or Flagger for automated canary analysis.
Deep Dive Guide
how to implement canary deployments flagger
Related Terms
More CI/CD Terms
Blue-Green Deployment
A release strategy using two identical environments to achieve zero-downtime deploys.
CI/CD
Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery — automating build, test, and deploy pipelines.
Feature Flag
A configuration mechanism to enable or disable features without redeploying code.
Flagger
A Kubernetes operator automating canary deployments, A/B tests, and blue-green releases.
GitHub Actions
GitHub's built-in CI/CD platform for automating workflows triggered by repository events.
GitLab CI
GitLab's integrated CI/CD system defined in a .gitlab-ci.yml file.
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