Advanced deployment techniques help teams control the deployment of new software versions as well as the rollout of new features to users. This includes the ability to release features to a limited audience, monitor the performance and behavior, and make a conscious decision whether to continue the rollout or if needed, to rollback.
Create two (nearly) identical environments, arbitrarily called blue and green. One isn't better than the other, just separate. With all traffic going to green, load new code onto blue, get it ready, and then switch the router to suddenly, as quickly as possible, send all new traffic to blue.
This is a very simple deployment where all of the old pods are killed and replaced all at once with the new ones.
In a Canary Release, you start with all your machines/dockers/pods at 100% of the current deployment. When you are ready to try out your new deployment on a subset of your users, you send those user's traffic to the new deployment, while the others are still on the current one. The terms canary release and incremental release are very similar and often used interchangeably.
In some cases, you may want to "canary" a new set of changes by sending a small number of requests to a different service than the production service. The canary annotation enables the Ingress spec to act as an alternative service for requests to route depending on the rules applied. We are working on extending support for optional NGNIX Ingress annotations via epic gitlab#3142. We are starting with gitlab#215501 which lets you set the canary's weight via an API for projects using Kubernetes.
This category is currently at the "Viable" maturity level, and our next maturity target is Complete (see our definitions of maturity levels).
Our top customer success issue is gitlab#8463. This bug shows duplicate instances on the deploy board. In case an application has multiple deployments, the deploy board will show an inappropriate number of pods.
Our top customer issue is gitlab#212320. It aims to bring our Deploy Boards into GitLab's open-source Core product, allowing everyone to benefit from this functionality.
Our top vision item is gitlab#226994 which introduces advanced deployments for non-Kubernetes users.
