Canary deployment via DNS

Canary deployment is a popular deployment method in the cloud. It allows you to deploy new versions of your resources alongside your old resources, gradually and selectively directing parts of your traffic to the new resource.

By directing a small portion of your traffic to your new resources, you can get valuable real-world data and metrics. This means you don't need to engage in a big bang deployment—where you switch over all of your traffic at once.

It also gives you more flexibility in terms of troubleshooting and monitoring; if you see errors for your new resources, you can redirect the traffic back to your old resources while you investigate.

In this recipe, we will create the resources necessary to do a DNS-based canary deployment, and cut traffic from one resource to another (that is, old to new).

Getting ready

This recipe requires a few things to be in place:

• A Route 53 hosted zone for your domain suffix
• Existing DNS records for your old and new resources/endpoints...