Canary release

How it is used

Also called a canary deployment; the first small group is 'the canary'. Traffic might go 1 percent, then 10, then 50, then 100. If errors rise, the canary is rolled back before most users are affected.

Example sentences

1. The canary release went to 5 percent of users, and error rates stayed flat, so we continued.

2. Our pipeline stops the canary release automatically if p99 latency goes up by more than 20 percent.

Common collocations

• canary release
• canary deployment
• promote the canary
• canary analysis

Related terms

• blue-green deploymentA release method with two identical production environments: the new version is put on the idle one, then all traffic is switched to it at once.
• roll outTo release a new version, feature or change to users or servers, often step by step over a period of time rather than all at once.
• feature flagA setting that turns a feature on or off without deploying new code, so it can be shown to some users, tested in production or switched off quickly.
• rollbackReturning a system to an earlier, working version after a new change causes problems.
• metricA number measured regularly over time to show how a system is behaving, such as CPU use, memory, request count or error rate.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

• canary release · Software Engineering

More terms: DevOps and CI/CD

• DevOps
• deploy
• deployment
• pipeline
• CI/CD
• environment
• production
• staging
• build
• continuous integration
• continuous delivery
• artifact