Benefits of Canary Deployments

Why go to the trouble of implementing a canary strategy? The benefits are many:

• A/B testing: we can use the canary to do A/B testing. In other words, we present two alternatives to the users and see which gets better reception.
• Capacity test: it’s impossible to test the capacity of a large production environment. With canary deployments, capacity tests are built-in. Any performance issues we have in our system will crop up as we slowly migrate the users to the canary.
• Feedback: we get invaluable input from real users.
• No cold starts: new systems can take a while to start up. Canary deployments slowly build up momentum to prevent cold-start slowness.
• No downtime: like blue-green deployments, a canary deployment doesn’t generate downtime.
• Easy rollback: if something goes wrong, we can easily roll back to the previous version.

Source: What Is Canary Deployment? - Semaphore (semaphoreci.com)