Canary Releases
Canary Releases and Traffic Control
Use canary deployments to shift 1 to 99 percent of production traffic, validate live behavior, and either promote or abort safely.
Where canary controls appear
Canary release controls live on deployment detail pages rather than in a separate global settings area.
The dashboard labels this area as Canary Release. On a stable deployment you will see gradual release controls, and on the live canary you will see traffic management controls.
- Use the Canary button from the active ready production deployment in the project deployment list.
- Use Manage canary on a ready live canary deployment to update traffic, promote, or abort.
- If another canary is already active for the project, the dashboard links you to that canary instead of allowing a second one to start.
Starting a canary
Canary releases are only supported for production deployments. The stable baseline must be the currently active production deployment, and it must already be ready and running.
When you start a canary, Apployd schedules the new deployment alongside the stable deployment on the same server so weighted routing can split traffic between both containers.
- Choose a traffic percentage between 1 and 99.
- Select one canary source: the latest branch head, a ready preview deployment, an existing reusable deployment, or an explicit branch, commit SHA, or image tag.
- Only one active canary is allowed per project at a time.
Managing live traffic
Once the canary deployment is ready, you can adjust the traffic percentage, promote it to 100 percent, or abort it and route traffic fully back to the stable deployment.
Traffic changes are queued operational actions, so the dashboard can briefly show the previous percentage until the routing update is applied.
- Update traffic keeps the canary between 1 and 99 percent.
- Promote requires the canary deployment to be ready before it can fully replace the stable deployment.
- Abort removes the canary from live routing and restores the stable deployment as the only production target.
Operational expectations
Canary releases are meant for controlled production validation, not for keeping two long-lived production versions active indefinitely.
Watch error rate, latency, and resource behavior before increasing traffic. Promote only after the canary looks operationally normal under real requests.
- Use preview deployments first for broader QA, then use canary traffic for real production sampling.
- Increase traffic in deliberate steps instead of jumping immediately to a large percentage.
- Abort quickly if the canary shows regressions, unstable runtime behavior, or unexpected cost pressure.