2.7Canary Deployment Checklist

Before enabling canary deployments:

• Metrics pipeline can differentiate traffic by version (labels, headers, or pod identity)
• Automated rollback is configured (not just manual intervention)
• Analysis window is long enough for your traffic volume
• Both canary and baseline are monitored by the same dashboards
• Alert routing accounts for canary failures (do not page for expected experiments)
• The team understands that a rollback is a success, not a failure -- you caught a problem before it reached all users