What Is Canary Deployment

In software engineering, canary deployment is the practice of making staged releases. We roll out a software update to a small part of the users first to test it and provide feedback. Once the change is accepted, the update is rolled out to the rest of the users.

Canary deployments show us how users interact with application changes in the real world. As in blue-green deployments, the canary strategy offers no-downtime upgrades and easy rollbacks. Unlike blue-green, canary deployments are smoother, and failures have limited impact.

A canary release is an early build of an application.

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