When human meets canary

Automated canary deployments are the true power-tool in your CI/CD toolbox but with great power comes great responsibility!

We truly believed that we had the ultimate sales pitch for our engineering community when we started promoting our latest and greatest addition to our CI/CD tool box - automated canary deployments! “You can spend more time on innovation and let this shiny tool bring it to your customers in a safe and reliable way. No more postponing deployments because you’re busy or it’s a risky change. No need to be staring at dashboards or scratching your head if a rollback is needed - the tool takes care of everything for you and in doing so saves you 3h per week.” Sounds like THE dream right?

Turns out not. Even after a lot of promotion and showcasing the tool in action, the adoption was far from what we hoped for. I’ll share why the perfect sales pitch can still prove useless when human nature and organisational culture kicks in, what we did to turn this around and how our organisation slowly but surely started its shift to a canary-first mindset.