[FIXED] What is a canary landscape?

Issue

I am familiar with a qual-/maint-/dev-/prod-/test landscape. Recently I just came across a landscape called "canary landscape". Can anyone explain the purpose of such a landscape to me?

Solution

Canary testing is pushing code changes into production for a only a small sub-set of users to validate the code changes are not buggy while minimizing risk. If you have 10k users, you could push to 100 users at first using load balancer / reverse proxy first and monitor the application performace, error logs etc. and if all is well, slowly increase that number until you're at 10k users on the new version and then switch the old version off. For a more detailed answer here is a pretty good write up of a real implementation of Canary Deployment.

Answered By - james_s_tayler

Answer Checked By - Gilberto Lyons (PHPFixing Admin)