Progressive Delivery & Advanced Deployment
Overview
What
Canary deployments, GitOps, progressive traffic shifting, and blue-green deployment automation.
Business Value
Reduces deployment risk by 85% and enables automatic rollback within 60 seconds of anomaly detection through canary deployments and metric monitoring
DORA Impact
- Deployment Frequency
- Mean Time to Recover
Key Features
- Automated Canary Deployments
- GitOps Deployment Model
- Automated Progressive Traffic Shifting
- Blue-Green Deployment Automation
Who
When
Acceleration (90-180 days)
Capabilities in This Epic
Automated Canary Deployments
>= 70% of production deployments use canary strategy (10% traffic -> 50% -> 100%) with automated rollback on error spike.
GitOps Deployment Model
>= 80% of deployments managed via GitOps (ArgoCD, Flux) with Git as single source of truth for desired state.
Automated Progressive Traffic Shifting
>= 70% of deployments use automated traffic shifting with SLO monitoring at each phase (Flagger, Argo Rollouts).
Blue-Green Deployment Automation
>= 60% of stateless services support instant blue-green cutover with automated traffic switching and rollback capability.
Implementation Journey
Prerequisites
Complete these before starting:
- Deploy foundations epic complete (automated deployments)
- Multiple deployment targets available (staging, prod)
- Traffic routing capability (load balancer, service mesh)
Typical Timeline
5 weeks
Effort Estimate
Breakdown by role:
Team Composition
Cross-functional team including: platform, engineer, sre, teams
Applicable Environments
Success Metrics
Entry Criteria
Prerequisites to start implementing this epic:
Exit Criteria
Criteria defined at the Acceleration milestone level:
DORA Metrics Impact
Resources
Implementation Kit
Step-by-step guide, templates, and tools for this epic
View Progressive Delivery & Advanced Deployment Implementation KitCommon Pitfalls
Mitigation: Define canary success criteria (error rate, latency). Auto-rollback on failure. Monitor metrics in real-time dashboard.
Mitigation: Use shared infrastructure with routing. Scale blue down after green validated. Consider canary instead for cost savings.
Mitigation: Start with 5% traffic. Increase gradually (5% to 25% to 50% to 100%). Monitor each stage for 30+ minutes.
Next Steps
After Completing This Epic
Once you've met all exit criteria, consider these next steps:
- Review metrics to validate DORA improvements
- Document lessons learned and update team playbooks
- Share success stories with other teams
Alternative Paths
Other epics that can be tackled in parallel: