deployment-canary

To define rollback criteria for a canary deployment, establish explicit rollback thresholds across system, user journey, and business guardrails. You assign clear ownership and decision rules to ensure promotion decisions are objective, repeatable, and triggered automatically when specific health metrics breach during the watch window.

A canary release watch window is a predefined monitoring period applied after a limited deployment, such as a 10% traffic slice or feature-flagged cohort. During this window, teams track layered system, user, and business signals to verify release health and determine whether to PROMOTE, HOLD, or ROLLBACK based on evidence.

You validate a limited release before a full rollout by applying a canary contract that scopes the deployment to a percentage traffic slice or regional cohort. You then monitor primary signals and guardrails throughout a specified watch window to detect regressions and enforce predefined rollback thresholds.

You should use canary rollouts for feature-flagged cohorts when releasing changes to a limited user group requires explicit scope, watch window duration, and predefined rollback thresholds. This approach makes health checks visible and attributable, ensuring safe promotion decisions for feature-flagged releases.

The best way to monitor traffic slices during a post-deploy limited rollout is to track a watchlist of system, user journey, and business guardrails. This provides explicit checks and status tracking so any metric breaches become visible and attributable to the canary release for quick containment.

If a system guardrail breaches during a canary release, predefined rollback thresholds are triggered to contain the incident. The investigation and decision workflow guides teams to run targeted investigations and choose to HOLD or ROLLBACK based on evidence rather than proceeding to a full rollout.