Automated Canary Analysis
Scale your deployments and business efficiently and achieve the growth you are looking for. Armory’s Automated Canary Analysis takes automation and intelligence end-to-end, providing you with confidence that your deployment is safe and reliable, every time.
What is Automated Canary Analysis?
First, let’s start with a canary deployment. During a canary deployment, a new version of your application is deployed to a percentage of your users to then analyze the behavior before advancing your deployment to an increased number of users (e.g: 25%, 50%, 75%, 100%). Eventually, you will have deployed your new version to the full population of users safely and securely, mitigating any risk for your users.
Canary analysis controls how canary deployments react based on queries to your observability data that you consider an important leading indicator.
Automated Canary Analysis reads the observability data from both versions (the current version and the new version being deployed) and runs an automated analysis to automate the behavior comparison. As you deploy your change to a percentage of users, Automated Canary Analysis automatically evaluates the performance and behavior to continue the deployment or initiate a rollback. This speeds up your deployment, time-to-market, and mitigates risk to your customers’ experience.
Canary deployments are the most popular deployment method engineering leaders aspire to use in the future.
Problem: Changes are the leading cause of incidents and incidents lead to bad experiences
Your customer experience is at the center of your competitive advantage. Customers expect ongoing and increased value, memorable experiences, and your service to be available when and where they want and or need it.
PwC’s research indicates “32% of all U.S. customers would stop doing business with a brand they loved after one bad experience. In Latin America, it’s 49%.” Gartner’s research indicates “85% of all performance incidents can be traced to code changes, data changes, workload changes, and infrastructure topology changes.”
In order to stay competitive you not only have to increase your velocity and accelerate your time-to-market, but you have to do so in a safe and reliable manner to improve and protect your customers’ experience.
Developers and SREs also need the insight to ensure the change is behaving as expected so they have confidence the deployment is safe and can continue focusing their time on innovative solutions that drive your differentiated value, not troubleshooting, fighting fires and spending all their time in relentless toil.
Armory’s Solution: Confidence in your deployments through automation and intelligence
Armory provides progressive deployment strategies like Blue/Green and Canary deployments that include Automated Canary Analysis out-of-the-box. Leverage the leading indicators in your metrics or logs from your observability solution. Deploy your changes in increments of your choosing, analyze the behavior to continue with the deployment if everything is within the acceptable bounds, or, if not, rollback automatically.
If you prefer, you can also enable manual approvals to continue the deployment or rollback. Through automation and intelligence, Armory’s Automated Canary Analysis provides you with confidence that your deployment is safe and reliable, allowing you to scale your deployments and business efficiently.
Before Armory, LaunchDarkly had 2 DevOps engineers supporting 8 developers; today, 7 DevOps engineers support 100 developers.
How Automated Canary Analysis Works
- Integrate your leading indicator metrics or logs from your observability data
- Perform a retrospective analysis to run the statistical analysis and baseline the expected behavior
- Add Canary analysis to your deployment
- Deploy your application
- At this point, Automated Canary Analysis runs a statistical analysis to automate the behavior comparison and continues with the deployment or performs a rollback
- Once you have confidence in your process and the analysis, switch from manual approvals to automatic approvals
Automated Canary Analysis Benefits
Leveraging a canary deployment with Automated Canary Analysis saves time and money through end-to-end automation, and it does not require health validation before routing any traffic, like Blue/Green deployments. Canary deployments with Automated Canary Analysis empower teams to test and see the results of the change side-by-side; in the same environment, so everything underlying the application remains like-for-like. Automating the analysis of your deployment means that you simplify operations, accelerate your time-to-market, and decrease your risks for change failures that cause customer outages. You not only improve your developers’ experience but also your customers’ experience, faster.
Who it Benefits
- Platform Ops – Spend less time troubleshooting change failures and more time improving your business.
- Application Devs – Test, compare, and see results of changes incrementally, in real-time, and automatically.
- Executives – Save money with cost efficient deployments that require less infrastructure and increase reliability, assuring your customers’ experience.
Summary
- The vast majority of incidents are caused by change failures
- To remain competitive you not only have to increase your velocity and accelerate your time-to-market, but you have to do so in a safe and reliable manner.
- Armory provides progressive deployment strategies like Blue/Green and Canary deployments that include Automated Canary Analysis out-of-the-box.
- Through automation and intelligence Armory’s Automated Canary Analysis provides you with confidence that your deployment is safe and reliable.
FAQ
How does Automated Canary Analysis help?
What is a Progressive Canary Deployment?
Commit. Deploy. Repeat.
Continuous Deployment at any scale, for all developers.