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Canary Deployment Vocabulary

5 questions · Progressive Delivery Language

1. A team announces: "We are doing a canary release at 5%." What does this mean, and where does the term "canary" come from?

A new version is deployed to a separate testing environment where 5% of the QA team validates it before wider release A new version receives 5% of live production traffic while the stable version serves the remaining 95% — the term references canaries used in coal mines as early warning systems The deployment is paused at 5% completion, pending manual approval to continue rolling out to all instances

2. An SRE defines promotion criteria for a canary deployment. What are promotion criteria?

The business metrics (revenue, signups) that must improve before the canary is considered a success The technical and reliability thresholds (error rate, latency, success rate) the canary must meet before traffic is increased to the next percentage The approval chain required from team leads before the deployment can proceed

3. An engineer says: "We hold the canary at 10% for a baking time of 30 minutes before promoting." What is the purpose of baking time?

A mandatory waiting period for compliance review before the deployment can affect more users A stabilisation window during which the canary is observed at the current traffic percentage — long enough to gather statistically meaningful metrics and catch issues that only appear under sustained traffic The time it takes for application caches to warm up after the new version receives its first traffic

4. A team uses Flagger to run automated canary deployments. What does Flagger automate?

Building and tagging container images for canary deployments The entire canary analysis and promotion loop: traffic shifting, metric querying, promotion or rollback decisions — without human intervention The post-incident review process after a failed canary deployment

5. A team describes their policy: "If the error rate exceeds 1% on the canary, we roll back automatically." What type of automated response is this?

A circuit breaker that pauses traffic to the canary until the error resolves An automatic rollback trigger — a metric threshold violation that causes the canary to be automatically abandoned and traffic returned to the stable version An alerting policy that notifies on-call engineers who then manually decide whether to roll back

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