For many years, we've used the canary release approach to encourage early feedback on new software versions, while reducing risk through incremental rollout to selected users. The 1% canary is a useful technique where we roll out new features to a very small segment (say 1%) of users carefully chosen across various user categories. This enables teams to capture fast user feedback, observe the impact of new releases on performance and stability and respond as necessary. This technique becomes especially crucial when teams are rolling out software updates to mobile applications or a fleet of devices like edge computing devices or software-defined vehicles. With proper observability and early feedback, it gives the opportunity to contain the blast radius in the event of unexpected scenarios in production. While canary releases can be useful to get faster user feedback, we believe starting with a small percentage of users is mandatory to reduce and contain the risk of large-scale feature rollouts.
Fast feedback is one of our core values for building software. For many years, we've used the canary release approach to encourage early feedback on new software versions, while reducing the risk through incremental rollout to selected users. One of the questions regarding this technique is how to segment users. Canary releases to a very small segment (say 1%) of users can be a catalyst for change. While starting with a very small segment of users enables teams to get comfortable with the technique, capturing fast user feedback enables diverse teams to observe the impact of new releases and learn and adjust course as necessary—a priceless change in engineering culture. We call this, the mighty 1% canary.
