With feature flags, you don’t need multiple environments and complicated routing configurations. But with a feature management platform like LaunchDarkly, you can simply roll out a feature to a canary group in a single production environment. We’ve just described a canary deployment using two separate production environments. While the bug still needs fixing, the pressure on you may be less than it would be if all users encountered the bug. If you have a bug in the new version, only 5% of your users are affected. Instead, you’re trying to minimize their impact. The goal is not to eliminate production bugs. Now you can monitor this canary release and fix any bugs that occur. These users will see the new features, while the other group of users doesn’t see any changes. Then you route a small subset of your users to this canary release. When you have a new release ready, you deploy it to one environment. You could have two web applications running on the same server, for example. This doesn’t have to mean two separate servers. Traditionally, in canary testing, you would first need two identical production environments. And you work under the pressure of deadlines and budgets.Ĭanary testing is a technique to let those production bugs affect only a small subset of your users. You can’t think about every edge case that might happen. If all is well, the update is pushed to the production environment, and the end users can enjoy the new feature.īut software being as it is, bugs inevitably find a way to production. The changes are deployed to a testing environment where someone else can play around with the new features.Developers write automated tests for the changes they’re making.Developers often employ these two techniques: You probably even have several techniques from the DevOps world such as A/B testing and blue-green deployments. Hopefully, you already have a procedure for testing your software changes. Let’s talk a little more about the idea behind canary testing. Similarly, but luckily in a less lethal situation, canary releases give you an early warning of things going wrong. If the canary died, the miners knew the lethal gas was building up to dangerous levels and it was time to evacuate. Up until the 1980s, coal miners would take a canary along with them in the mine to indicate the presence of odorless but toxic gases. We can thank coal mining for the term canary testing. Canary testing, then, is the act of using canary releases (also called canary deployments) to test out new features or new software versions with real users in a live production environment. In this article, canary release or canary deployment refer to a software release that’s being used for canary testing. People often use the terms canary testing, canary release, and canary deployment interchangeably. Canary testing is a powerful way of testing new features and new functionality in production with minimal impact to users.
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