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EXPEDIA GROUP TECHNOLOGY — SOFTWARE
Automating Performance Standards
Or how I learned to stop worrying and love canary releases
“Canary releases: releasing software is too often art, it should be an engineering discipline” — David Farley, Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation
The term canary comes from an old coal mining technique in which canaries were used for the early detection of airborne toxins. Similarly, the canary release provides the ability to do capacity testing of a new release in a production environment with a safe rollback strategy if issues are found.
By slowly ramping up the load, one could monitor and capture metrics about how the new version impacts production. This is an alternative approach to creating an entirely separate capacity testing environment because the environment will be as production-like as it could be, it is in fact production!
Why automate performance monitoring?
Recently, I had an opportunity to build and standardize performance tooling across the Expedia Group™️ Flights team and…
