What is a Canary Release?

A canary release is a software deployment strategy where new features are made available to a limited group of users before being rolled out to the entire user base. This approach helps improve software quality and reduces risks associated with shipping updates. The name "canary" comes from an old mining practice where miners would use canaries to detect toxic gases in coal mines. Canary releases allow developers to identify bugs, breaks, and hazards of new features before a wider rollout. While similar to blue-green deployments, canary releases are more targeted towards specific user groups. Feature flags can be used alongside canary releases to simplify the release process by introducing new code to a small portion of users within the main production environment.