Staged rollout
Releasing a change to progressively larger groups of systems, starting with a small canary, with a bake time and health checks between steps so a bad change can be halted and rolled back before it reaches everyone. It applies to configuration, rules and other content as much as to code.
- Also called
- canary deployment · canary release · phased rollout
- Defined in
- Google SRE Workbook: Canarying releases
Covered in
Guide
Staged rollout and rollback for security-critical updates
Ship security fixes, detection content and configuration quickly without taking the fleet down: rollout rings and canaries, content validation, kill switches and rollback that works on a broken host.
Case study
Case study: CrowdStrike Channel File 291 (July 2024)
How a CrowdStrike content update crashed Windows hosts in July 2024: a field-count mismatch hidden by wildcard tests, a missing bounds check, and no staged rollout.