Comparison
Deployment ringvsProgressive delivery
Deployment ring
your own staff get it first, then the tolerant customers, then everyone, over about a week.
Grouping the audience into ordered cohorts by risk tolerance and releasing outward through them. It differs from a canary in that the cohorts are populations rather than percentages of traffic, so it works for things a canary cannot cover — desktop clients, mobile releases, tenanted systems. The first ring being your own organisation is the whole trick, since it converts customer-found bugs into staff-found ones.
Full entry →Progressive delivery
the release goes to one percent, then five, then twenty-five, and each step is only taken if the metrics stayed flat.
Releasing to progressively larger portions of traffic with automated analysis deciding whether to continue, pause or revert. It is canarying with the judgement automated and formalised into steps. It requires two things most teams lack before they start: routing that can split traffic by percentage, and a metric trustworthy enough to abort a release on.
Full entry →