Question 1

What's the difference between Canary Deployment and Blue/Green deployment?

Accepted Answer

Canary deployment shifts a small percentage of real traffic to the new version first (for example 5% → 25% → 50% → 100%) and increases gradually if metrics look good. Blue/green deployment runs two full environments (blue=old, green=new) and typically switches traffic all at once (or nearly all at once) from blue to green, making rollback fast but often requiring more duplicate capacity.

Question 2

When should I use Canary Deployment?

Accepted Answer

Use canary deployment when you want to reduce risk during releases, especially for customer-facing services where failures are costly. It’s a good fit when you have strong monitoring (errors, latency, saturation), automated rollback, and a way to route traffic by percentage (load balancer, ingress controller, service mesh, or platform traffic splitting). It’s especially useful for frequent releases, microservices, and changes that might behave differently under real production load.

Question 3

How much does Canary Deployment cost?

Accepted Answer

The technique itself is not billed, but it can increase costs depending on how you implement it. Common cost drivers include: (1) running two versions at once (extra compute during the rollout), (2) load balancing or service mesh components, (3) increased observability (metrics, logs, traces) to evaluate the canary, and (4) CI/CD tooling and automation. Costs are usually temporary during the rollout window, but can be ongoing if you keep canary infrastructure or advanced monitoring always enabled.

Canary Deployment

Definition

Real-World Example

Related Terms

Cloud Provider Equivalencies

Explore More Cloud Computing Terms