Do we need Istio for this?

No. Argo Rollouts supports NGINX Ingress, ALB, and SMI/Linkerd. We chose Istio because the client already used it for mTLS and policy.

Can we do this without Kubernetes?

Yes. We’ve done progressive delivery on ECS using ALB weighted target groups and on Cloud Run with percent-based traffic splits. The principles (metrics, gates, auto-rollback) are the same.

We’re on Datadog/New Relic. Still doable?

Absolutely. Replace the Prometheus provider in AnalysisTemplates with Datadog or Web metrics providers. We have templates for both.

How do feature flags fit with rollouts?

Use rollouts to safely deploy code by traffic percentage and use feature flags to control who sees new behavior. Together they limit blast radius and let you test in production without page-one outages.

Case-studies · Oct 25, 2025 · 8 minute read

The Canary That Stopped Our Friday Night Rollbacks: Progressive Delivery in a High-Stakes Checkout Service

How Argo Rollouts, Istio traffic splits, and real SLO guardrails cut change failure rate by 74% in six weeks.

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The Canary That Stopped Our Friday Night Rollbacks: Progressive Delivery in a High-Stakes Checkout Service

Key takeaways

Implementation checklist