Perhaps the closest analogy would be deploying to a limited subset of users on closely monitored boxes. It's clearly not perfect though, except perhaps if the

Perhaps the closest analogy would be deploying to a limited subset of users on closely monitored boxes. It's clearly not perfect though, except perhaps if the test aircraft turned itself into a crater on the runway, there is very little one aircraft can do to effect the function of all others. In software it's hard to get this kind of guarantee, a new delete with a missing where clause in your canary environment is going to take some time to clean up after (assuming you have backups etc).