Kanary

What Kanary is

Kanary is a self-hosted tool for automating canary deployments on Kubernetes. It uses a custom resource definition and controller to manage the canary’s scheduling, scaling, traffic, validation, and rollout. After a canary passes validation, Kanary can move its template into the regular deployment. Traffic can come from the production service, a dedicated Kanary service, both, mirrored traffic, or no service traffic. Validation can use manual status, label watching, or PromQL queries against Prometheus metrics. Canary instances can use a fixed replica count or a HorizontalPodAutoscaler.

For Istio, the project provides examples that create PromQL validations for response-time P99 and success rate. The kubectl kanary plugin can generate a KanaryDeployment artifact from an existing Deployment and retrieve Kanary deployments. Installation is documented through Helm or Kubernetes resource manifests. The controller removes related canary resources after success or failure, while preserving the original deployment history and classic rollback capability. Kanary is open-source software under the MIT License and costs nothing. The repository’s Releases page states that there are no releases.

Who it suits

Kanary suits Kubernetes users who want to automate canary scheduling, scaling, traffic routing, validation, and rollout in a self-managed environment. It may fit teams using Istio examples or Prometheus metrics as part of validation.

Limits

Kanary is self-managed on Kubernetes. The repository's Releases page states that there are no releases.

Getting started

1. Open the Kanary project website at https://github.com/AmadeusITGroup/kanary.
2. Install Kanary with Helm or by applying Kubernetes resource manifests.
3. Use the kubectl kanary plugin to generate a KanaryDeployment artifact from an existing Deployment, or retrieve Kanary deployments.
4. Configure traffic routing, canary scaling, and validation for the deployment.
5. Run the canary and promote its template to the regular deployment after successful validation.

Verdict

Choose Kanary if you need an open-source controller for managing Kubernetes canary traffic, validation, scaling, and promotion. Look elsewhere if you need a managed deployment service or require a project with published releases.