Canary releases are a powerful technique for updating large-scale production environments safely. The idea is simple: deploy the update to a subset of your environment, pause and monitor to ensure everything is healthy, and then deploy to the next subset. But implementing these staged releases can be challenging, as you’ll need to retool your deployment pipeline and build programmatic health checks to validate the success of each canary release.

Last month, members of the Datadog community convened in Seattle for our customer summit. There, they discussed new developments in monitoring dynamic infrastructure and applications, learned about the latest updates to the Datadog platform, and shared tips, tools, and techniques from their own experiences.

“I’ve run a lot of systems in production, and a lot of what has gone into the Kubernetes project came out of scars that came from running web search in production and running API services,” Brendan Burns, the co-creator of Kubernetes, said at the top of his keynote at GrafanaCon L.A.