DevOps Articles

Automated Canary Deployment with HashiCorp Consul and Spinnaker

When you update an application or system, you likely push the changes to production and manually verify whether or not it works.

Instead, you can use a canary deployment to send a small percentage of traffic to new versions of an application or system.

You can configure Spinnaker to retrieve the proxy metrics for successful requests and errors to the “web” service and monitor the status of the canary.

For example, if the canary analysis succeeds with 30% of requests going to the canary version, Spinnaker changes the text manifest for the service splitter to 50%: You can configure Spinnaker canary analysis with a variety of parameters.

You can still use the canary version of the application to debug the error in isolation since it does not receive traffic: By adding Consul service mesh’s observability and traffic management to your continuous delivery pipelines, you can implement a side-by-side canary deployment.