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World Congress 2026 Europe • Jul 10, 2026 • Session details

When human meets canary

Sonja Nesic

Bol.com pushed automated canary deployments, but engineers hesitated. Discover how this failed tooling adoption exposed shaky architectures and catalyzed a wholesale transformation toward true continuous delivery.

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#1 about 2 min

Bridging the gap between engineering confidence and new technology

How the success of automated deployments and artificial intelligence relies entirely on building developer trust.

#2 about 3 min

The historical origins and principles of canary testing

How the discovery of carbon monoxide poisoning in mines established the safety principles behind gradual exposure testing.

#3 about 1 min

Applying canary deployment principles to modern software releases

Gradually exposing customers to new software versions while monitoring signals to mitigate deployment risks.

#4 about 2 min

Essential prerequisites and disclaimers for canary automation

Why strong production observability and solid testing fundamentals are required before attempting automated rollouts.

#5 about 3 min

Identifying bottlenecks in standard deployment pipelines

Revealing how manual reviews, wait times, and manual dashboard monitoring waste valuable engineering productivity.

#6 about 3 min

Automating canary deployments with Argo Rollouts

Using declarative specifications to control deployment stages, run flexible health checks, and automate rollbacks.

#7 about 2 min

Understanding the failure of a perfect tool pitch

Why comprehensive documentation, promotion, and playground projects failed to drive widespread adoption among engineering teams.

#8 about 3 min

Uncovering the technical root causes of low developer adoption

Discovering that complex architectural debt, mixed concerns, and poor testability prevented teams from trusting automated systems.

#9 about 2 min

Shifting to a culture of continuous proof and best practices

Refactoring systems for targeted testability and prioritizing solid observability implementations prior to enabling deployment tools.

#10 about 2 min

Accepting baseline engineering confidence as a technical blocker

Realizing that advanced deployment tooling fails completely if underlying code quality and monitoring cannot reliably catch errors.

#11 about 3 min

Using failed adoption to drive necessary architectural improvements

How the initial push for automated deployments acted as a catalyst for better software design and future readiness.

#12 about 2 min

Distinguishing canary deployments from standard application testing

Clarifying that canary releases validate software stability during rollouts rather than measuring customer conversion metrics.

#13 about 1 min

Defining accurate health signals for reliable automated rollouts

Monitoring product analytics alongside basic infrastructure metrics to effectively identify functional issues during production deployments.

#14 about 1 min

Integrating deployment automation tools with existing service meshes

Leveraging networking foundations like Istio to substantially reduce the platform engineering effort required for rollout automation.

#15 about 2 min

Maintaining pre-deployment testing standards alongside canary features

Using canary strategies to supplement thorough pre-production quality checks rather than replacing traditional automated testing pipelines entirely.

Matching moments

2:49 min

Adopting continuous delivery for highly sustainable software operations

Steve Upton Steve Upton · World Congress 2024

2:20 min

Validating automated code fixes using canary deployments

Rajat Shah Rajat Shah · World Congress 2026 North America

5:47 min

Handling deployment failures via automated canary rollbacks

Carlos Sanchez Carlos Sanchez · World Congress 2024

3:51 min

Balancing automated deployments with human infrastructure oversight

Hazal Mestci +1 · Coffee With Developers

4:09 min

Overcoming developer resistance to accelerate software deployments

Mesut Ayata Mesut Ayata · World Congress 2024

17:55 min

Overcoming cultural friction and scaling DevOps team practices

Jacob Duijzer · LIVE

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