Introduction
TOC
Canary Release Introduction
The Canary Release module enables controlled deployment of service updates through gradual traffic shifting and real-time monitoring. Designed for Kubernetes environments integrated with Istio, it supports:
- Risk mitigation for production deployments
- Multi-phase release strategies (canary/blue-green/A/B testing)
- Automated rollback on failure detection
- Unified observability across release lifecycle
Advantages
-
Flexible Traffic Control Supports manual and automated traffic splitting with 1% granularity
-
Real-Time Metrics Provides request success rate, latency, and RPS tracking during release
-
GitOps Integration Compatible with Git-managed deployments through CRD configurations
-
Visual Pipeline Displays release progress through intuitive dashboard metrics
Scenarios
-
Low-Risk Version Rollouts Gradually shift 5-20% traffic to new version while monitoring errors
-
Feature Flag Testing Route specific user groups via HTTP headers (e.g. beta testers)
-
Performance Validation Compare response times between versions under real traffic
-
Emergency Rollback Automatically revert to stable version when error rates exceed threshold
Limitations
- Incompatible with existing service routing configurations
- Requires unique service naming across clusters
- GitOps-managed services have limited UI controls
- Security policies remain active during release