How Canary Deployments Work in Kubernetes, Istio and Linkerd

A refinement of the canary pattern called canary analysis involves an additional baseline cluster running services of the current production version alongside the canary cluster and with equal amounts of traffic. To implement a canary pattern, for instance, operators could specify a rule like

to divert 1% of traffic to a users-v2 canary. Unlike Kubernetes, canary deployments in Istio can be implemented without requiring a specific number of instances.

Source: glasnostic.com