Canary Deployment
Gradually rolling out a new release to a small subset of users before full release.
Also: phased rollout
Definition
Canary deployment is a progressive release strategy where a new version is deployed to a small percentage of production servers or users first, allowing teams to monitor for errors and performance issues before expanding to the full user base. Named after the canary in a coal mine concept, it limits the blast radius of potential failures. Traffic routing uses feature flags, load balancer weights, or service mesh configuration to control the rollout percentage.
Example
“The team released the new recommendation engine to 5% of users as a canary; after 24 hours of normal error rates and improved click-through, they expanded to 25%, then 100% over two days.”
Synonyms
- progressive rollout
- staged rollout
- phased release
- gradual deployment
Antonyms / Opposites
- big bang release
- immediate full rollout
Images
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Related Terms
- blue-green-deployment
- feature-flag
- load-balancer
- microservices