How can Envoy assist in canary deployments?

Envoy is specifically designed to support various deployment strategies, including canary deployments, which allow developers to release new versions of a service incrementally. By routing a small percentage of traffic to new service versions, Envoy enables testing of the new version in a live environment without fully committing all resources and user traffic to it. This allows teams to monitor performance and collect feedback in real time, making it easier to identify any issues before a complete rollout.

This controlled traffic flow minimizes risk, ensuring that if there are problems with the new version, only a limited number of users are affected. It provides the opportunity to validate the new features or changes in a safe manner, aligning with the goals of continuous delivery and agile methodologies. This versatility and precision in traffic management is a key strength of Envoy when implemented in canary deployment scenarios.