Do we need a service mesh to do progressive delivery?

No, but it helps. Argo Rollouts can route traffic via Istio, Linkerd, or even NGINX/ALB. If you’re not ready for a mesh, start with blue/green and feature flags, then add canary routing when you have the operational maturity.

How do we make this work with PCI/SOC2?

Use GitOps for manifests, capture rollout logs and approvals in your ticketing system, and require Slack approvals for step‑ups. Auditors love deterministic processes. We’ve passed audits with this setup multiple times.

What if our observability isn’t ready?

Start with Prometheus for technical gates and derive one business KPI. You can add Datadog/New Relic later. Bad gates are worse than no gates—keep them simple and strict at first.

Does this slow us down?

It speeds you up. Smaller changes, automated gates, and built‑in rollback cut MTTR and CFR, which increases deploy frequency. Our client went from 2 to 14 deploys/week in six weeks.

Case-studies · Oct 18, 2025 · 10 minute read

The Canary That Cut Our Incident Rate: Progressive Delivery in a PCI‑Bound Fintech

How a regulated payments platform dropped change failure rate from 18% to 3% by moving from big‑bang deploys to canaries, feature flags, and auto‑rollback—without slowing the roadmap.

Samir Patel

Partner, GitPlumbers

20 years wrangling outages, migrations, and audits at fintechs and SaaS unicorns. Ex-SRE lead at a public payments company. I help teams ship faster without burning their error budgets.

We stopped betting the company on every deploy. A 1% canary with good gates beats a 100% blast radius every day of the week.

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The Canary That Cut Our Incident Rate: Progressive Delivery in a PCI‑Bound Fintech

Key takeaways

Implementation checklist