Do we need a service mesh for canaries?

No. Argo Rollouts can integrate with service meshes like Istio/Linkerd or with NGINX/ALB for traffic splitting. Start with what you have; don’t block on mesh adoption.

Won’t policy-as-code slow teams down?

Good policy speeds you up by removing debate. We see lead time improve once guardrails eliminate back-and-forth and failures. Exceptions can be time-boxed and self-service.

Which flag provider should we use?

Pick based on governance and SDK maturity. We like LaunchDarkly and Unleash. Use OpenFeature to abstract providers and standardize metadata and auditing.

How do we track CFR, lead time, and MTTR without buying another platform?

Emit change events from CI/CD and rollout controllers, store them in your existing observability stack (Prometheus/ELK/Datadog), and compute metrics in dashboards. No new shelfware required.

What about databases and migrations?

Use expand/contract patterns with backward-compatible schemas, gated behind flags. Blue/green at the app tier, not the DB. For risky migrations, canary with read-only validation first.

Release-engineering · Oct 22, 2025 · 9 minute read

Progressive Delivery With Teeth: Flags, Canaries, Blue/Green — Governed, Audited, and Boringly Safe

You don’t need another shiny deploy tool. You need guardrails that crush change failure rate, shrink lead time, and make recovery muscle memory.

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Progressive Delivery With Teeth: Flags, Canaries, Blue/Green — Governed, Audited, and Boringly Safe

Key takeaways

Implementation checklist