Canary deployment: improving your software development cycles

Canary deployment is a strategy used by software development teams to test new features or changes in production on a small subset of users before rolling them out to everyone. This approach helps detect issues early and prevents problems from affecting the entire user base. Benefits include risk reduction, early feedback, improved quality, and faster rollouts. Implementing canary deployment involves identifying the canary group, releasing to that group, monitoring and collecting feedback, adjusting as necessary, and rolling out changes to everyone else. Key best practices for canary deployment include selecting a diverse and representative canary group, ensuring uniform random distribution, avoiding feature correlation, and maintaining sticky user assignments.