canary
termops culturecloud
Exposing a change to a small, real slice of traffic first, so the failure is discovered by few rather than by everyone.
It works only if two things are true, and both are commonly missing. There must be a signal that distinguishes the canary from the rest, which means metrics segmented by version rather than aggregated. And there must be a rollback that can be executed under pressure by whoever is awake. Without those, a canary is a deployment with extra steps that still fails everywhere, five minutes later than it would have.
Also known as: canary release