Canary deployments, A/B testing, and microservices with Edge Stack

Canary deployments are a technique for testing changes on real-world traffic, particularly useful in microservices architectures. They allow teams to test multiple versions of their service simultaneously and control which versions are being tested. A Layer 7 reverse proxy is necessary to support these capabilities, with Envoy Proxy being an example. Ambassador Edge Stack, built around Envoy, can be configured using Kubernetes annotations for canary deployments. This involves deploying a stable version of the service and then creating a canary deployment with a different weight. Traffic can be tested between the two versions, and if necessary, rolled back to the stable version by deleting the canary deployment.