[cavisne]

I suspect you are confusing the terms.

What Google/Netflix call a "Canary" other companies call "deploying a single host/percentage of production traffic with a new version". When other companies talk about canaries they mean regular tests against production to detect issues.

[donavanm]

Youre correct. I didnt catch the distinction when I first skimmed the article and parent comment. Part of it is that my active “canary” tests themselves emit relevant TSD indicative of system performance.

The general concept outlined Id lump in to “approval workflows.” The gradual, intentional, deployment of mixed versions to the same workload Id call something like A/B or red/blue version deployments.

[joshuamorton]

At least from what I've seen red/green (I've heard blue/green) or A/B deployments represent a different thing. A blue/green deployment says you have 2 environments, each able to handle all of your traffic. So you have 2x the servers you need running, and move traffic between environments to upgrade. Its double buffering, but with binary versions.

The (traffic) canarying process that Google and Netflix use, and that is described in this article is distinct from that, since you don't need a significant amount of overhead.

[donavanm]

Huh. Nomenclature. FWIW Ive also never heard of A/B being limited to binary or requiring full N sets of resources. I've only seen it as small subsets of traffic that is ramped up to some confidence interval. Similarly two concurrent variants is the simplest and minimal value. But Ive also seen literally thousands of concurrent variants with enough workload & consumers. Agree on overhead, as it's essentially a version management + stable routing problem you dont/shouldnt increase resource requirements.