Flagger

Continuous delivery is accepted as an enterprise software practice, and is a natural evolution of well-regarded continuous integration principles. However, continuous deployment continues to be notably rare, perhaps due to the complexity of management and the fear of failed deployments impacting system availability.

Flagger is an open source Kubernetes operator that aims to untangle this complexity. It automates the promotion of canary deployments by using Istio’s traffic shifting and Prometheus metrics to analyse the application's behaviour during a controlled rollout. The canary analysis can be extended with webhooks for running integration tests, load tests or any other custom validation.

Flagger implements a control loop that gradually shifts traffic to the canary while measuring key performance indicators like HTTP requests success rate, requests average duration and pods health. Based on the KPIs analysis a canary is promoted or aborted and the analysis result is published to Slack.

For the install instructions and usage examples please see docs.flagger.app

This project is sponsored by Weaveworks