Continuous delivery has been a driving force behind software development, testing and deployment for years, and CI/CD best-practices are evolving with the advent of new technologies like Kubernetes and Istio.

Progressive delivery, a term coined by James Governor of Redmonk, is a new approach to continuous delivery that includes “a new basket of skills and technologies… Such as canarying, feature flags, [and] A/B testing at scale”.

Andrew will demo a canary deployment combining service mesh and Flagger, a progressive delivery operator. Traditional canary deployments shift traffic, so bad canaries still partially degrade user experience – Andrew will show an enhancement that mirrors traffic before shifting, which can prevent bad canaries from being visible to any users. He will compare traffic mirroring to other techniques, exploring when you might choose what kinds of progressive delivery.