Traffic-Shifting Deployment Strategies

~8 min read

Canary and linear deployments — gradually exposing a new version to real traffic instead of switching everyone at once.

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Key points

  • Canary: shift a fixed percentage first, wait and monitor, then shift the rest at once
  • Linear: shift in small, equal increments at regular intervals until 100%, most gradual
  • Both pair with CloudWatch alarms for automatic rollback if a problem is detected mid-rollout
  • More gradual strategies minimize blast radius but take longer; all-at-once is fastest but riskiest