< session />

The Fine Art of Canary Deployments

Canary deployments are the final piece of any Continuous Delivery or Continuous Deployment rollout. A canary deployment is a strategy that releases an application or service incrementally to a subset of users, gradually updating all infrastructure in phases (e.g., 2%, 25%, 75%, 100%). This approach reduces risk compared to other deployment strategies, such as blue-green deployments, making it ideal for minimizing disruption. If you need the ability to quickly roll back a production deployment with minimal impact, setting up canary deployments might be the best practice for you.

This talk will walk you through setting up a canary deployment in your work environment, step by step:

• Overview of Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, and Continuous Deployment
• Canary deployment strategies for cloud instances or Kubernetes
• Explanation of Canary: what it is and the strategies you can use
• CD frameworks that perform Canary Deployments
• Performance metrics: are things moving too fast or too slow?
• Backing out of a rollout if needed
• Can you perform canary deployments without a CD framework? Using native Kubernetes?
• Practical examples with Spinnaker, Argo, Istio
• Conclusion

Target Audience: This session is primarily aimed at OpsTech Professionals, as canary deployments are an essential part of managing production environments, minimizing risk, and ensuring smooth rollouts. Back-end Developers are the secondary audience, as they often need to work closely with deployment strategies to ensure successful service releases. Software Architects may also find value in this session, as designing systems that can easily accommodate canary deployment strategies requires careful planning and consideration of operational concerns.