The idea of using a canary as an early warning system has a long history. Long before Google or Netflix used them, coal miners carried real canaries along to find gas leaks. When these little birds—more susceptible than humans to the odorless fumes—checked out, it was time to get out of the mine.

Predictably, as technology progressed, things got better. Today, cloud technologies make things less wildlife-endangering and much more practical:

Canary releases: as long as we have some way of remotely updating software, we can do canary releases. App stores are a great example of this. Both Google Play and Apple’s App Store support staged rollouts. This feature lets us push updates in waves, to a set percent of users at a time.

Rolling canaries: we have numerous tools like AWS CodeDeploy, Chef, Puppet, or Docker to help us perform rolling updates.

Side-by-side canaries: cloud allows us to create and tear down hardware and services on demand. We have tools like Terraform, Ansible, or AWS CloudFormation to define infrastructure using code.

CI/CD: when we add continuous delivery and deployment into the mix, we get one of the most effective patterns for shipping out code.