canary deployment

Definition

A release strategy where you deploy new code to a small subset of users first, watching for problems before unleashing it on everyone. Named after coal miners' canaries—if your users start falling over, you know not to proceed.

Example Usage

Let's do a canary deployment to 5% of traffic and monitor error rates before the full rollout.

Origin

Named after the practice of using canaries in coal mines to detect toxic gases, applied to software deployment in the 2010s

Fun Fact

Unlike actual canaries, which died to warn miners, your canary users are very much alive and will definitely tweet about any bugs they encounter.

Source: DevOps and continuous deployment methodologies

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