Canary deployment

[walkerrandolphsmith]

User segmentation describes the process of dividing your customer base into subsets based on one or more dimensions. Perhaps it is their geographical location, role, system activity. We can experiment with new ideas and release them to specific segments.

Different from blue-green deployments in that the new capability is rolled out to a specific user segment to mitigate risk.
We can use Istio to manage envoy sidecar proxies and apply HTTP header rules. Our application can apply information about what user segment a user is a member to HTTP headers and Istio can route traffic based on those headers.

If the HTTP header X-Segment-Role-Admin is present route traffic to a service tagged with beta-layout-for-admins and to alpha version otherwise.