A canary release is an early build of an application. Splitting stable and development branches is a widespread strategy in the open-source world. Many projects use an odd/even numbering scheme to separate stable from the non-stable version.

In a canary deployment, on the other hand, we install the update in our systems and split the users into two groups. A small percentage of them will go to the canary while the rest stay on the old version, as a control