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  "description": "Canary Deployment is a release strategy that routes a small fraction of traffic to a new version first, observes its behaviour against the old version, and gradually expands the new version's share if metrics stay healthy. The name comes from \"canary in a coal mine\": the small early group surfaces problems before the rest of the population is exposed.\n\n\nHow it works\n\n 1. Deploy the new version alongside the existing one.\n 2. Route a small percentage of traffic (1%, 5%) to the new version.\n 3. Co",
  "path": "/engineering-glossary/canary-deployment-gradual-rollout/",
  "publishedAt": "2026-05-12T18:25:38.000Z",
  "site": "https://sahilkapoor.com",
  "tags": [
    "CI/CD",
    "Blue-Green Deployment",
    "Feature Flag",
    "GitOps",
    "ArgoCD"
  ],
  "textContent": "**Canary Deployment** is a release strategy that routes a small fraction of traffic to a new version first, observes its behaviour against the old version, and gradually expands the new version's share if metrics stay healthy. The name comes from \"canary in a coal mine\": the small early group surfaces problems before the rest of the population is exposed.\n\n## How it works\n\n  1. Deploy the new version alongside the existing one.\n  2. Route a small percentage of traffic (1%, 5%) to the new version.\n  3. Compare key metrics (error rate, latency, business KPIs) between the two cohorts.\n  4. Gradually shift more traffic if healthy; roll back instantly if not.\n  5. Once 100% is on the new version, retire the old.\n\n\n\n## Traffic routing options\n\n  * **Random percentage.** Hash request IDs to a bucket and route based on that.\n  * **Sticky.** Once a user lands on a version, keep them there for session consistency.\n  * **Targeted.** Internal employees first, then beta users, then a percentage of all users.\n\n\n\n## Common tools\n\n  * Argo Rollouts, Flagger, Istio, Linkerd, AWS App Mesh, LaunchDarkly (for feature-flag-driven canaries)\n\n\n\n🔗\n\n**Related Terms**\nCI/CD, Blue-Green Deployment, Feature Flag, GitOps, ArgoCD.",
  "title": "Canary Deployment",
  "updatedAt": "2026-05-13T19:14:55.942Z"
}