Canary Release Strategy

Overview

Canary deployment in Facets is an Argo Rollouts-based deployment strategy that incrementally rolls out changes to a subset of your infrastructure before promoting to the full environment. It reduces risk by validating changes in a limited scope before full production exposure.

Supported Resource Type: service

Prerequisites

• A service resource configured in your Facets blueprint.
• A Kubernetes cluster with Argo Rollouts (included with Facets).

Required permissions:

• Plan Release / Apply Release Plan — to trigger releases.
• Promote — to graduate canary to stable, abort — to halt a canary rollout.

Step 1 — Configure Canary Strategy on the Service Resource

In your service resource configuration JSON, set the deployment strategy to Canary and define rollout behavior:

{
  "spec": {
    "release": {
      "strategy": {
        "type": "Canary",
        "canary_strategy": {
          "enable_auto_abort": true,
          "auto_abort_timeout": 120
        }
      },
      "deployment": {
        "max_surge": 1,
        "max_unavailable": 0,
        "min_ready_seconds": 30,
        "progress_deadline_seconds": 600,
        "auto_promotion_seconds": 300,
        "scale_down_delay_seconds": 30
      }
    }
  }
}

Key Configuration Options

Step 2 — Trigger a Release

• Navigate to your Project → Environment in the Facets UI. Go to Releases and click Trigger Release.
• Select the service resource(s) with canary strategy configured.
• Click Plan to preview the release changes (dry-run).
• Review the plan output and click Apply to begin the canary rollout.
• Facets will initiate the Argo Rollouts controller, which creates the canary pod set alongside the stable set.

Step 3 — Monitor the Canary Rollout

During an active canary rollout, monitor progress via:

• Live Insights & Operations dashboard — real-time pod-level metrics (CPU, memory, restart count).
• Kubernetes Dashboard — pod status, events, and deployment progression.
• Kubernetes Events Dashboard — filter events by namespace to track rollout activity.

Watch for:

• Pod restart frequency or CrashLoops in canary pods.
• Elevated error rates or latency from canary traffic.
• progress_deadline_seconds breaches indicating a stuck rollout.

Step 4 — Promote or Abort

Promote (Graduate Canary to Stable)

If the canary is healthy and validated:

• In the Facets UI, navigate to the resource's Live Tab. Click the Promote action.
• This advances the canary version to stable and scales down the old stable pods.

Automatic promotion: If auto_promotion_seconds is set and the canary remains healthy, Facets promotes automatically after the configured duration without manual intervention.

Abort (Rollback Canary)

If issues are detected:

• Click the Abort action in the UI.
• Argo Rollouts immediately stops the canary rollout and scales the canary pods down, restoring full traffic to the stable version.

Automatic abort: If enable_auto_abort: true and the rollout exceeds auto_abort_timeout seconds, Facets aborts automatically, preventing prolonged exposure to a faulty update.

Canary Metadata (Optional)

You can apply distinct labels and annotations to stable vs. canary pod sets for observability and traffic filtering:

{
  "stable_metadata": {
    "labels": { "track": "stable" },
    "annotations": {}
  },
  "canary_metadata": {
    "labels": { "track": "canary" },
    "annotations": {}
  }
}

This is useful for routing canary traffic through a separate ingress path or for filtering metrics by deployment track in your monitoring stack.