Considerations for adopting Canary releases

A canary release is a tactic for reducing deployment risk. The idea is to deploy a new release to one or two nodes in a service cluster, let them handle some portion of the work load, and see if any unexpected errors result. In effect, this is a kind of "testing" in production. The term comes from the practice of miners to bring canaries with them into the mines; if the canaries died, then the air wasn't safe to breathe and they should evacuate. Like all strategies, there are advantages and d...