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Canary Release

In a canary release, you can introduce a new version of your application and send a small portion of traffic to it for testing. Meanwhile, the old version handles the remaining traffic. If everything goes well, you can gradually increase the traffic sent to the new version while phasing out the old version. If any issues arise, you can change the traffic ratio and roll back to the old version.

This method allows for efficient testing of performance and reliability, helping to identify potential issues in a real-world environment without affecting the overall stability of the system.

Prerequisites

Prepare a project (e.g., demo-project) and a user (e.g., project-regular). The user should have been invited to the project and has the operator role in it. For more information, please refer to Control User Permissions.
KubeSphere Service Mesh and KubeSphere Gateway should have been installed and enabled.
Enable the project gateway and enable the Tracing function for the project gateway. For more information, please refer to Enable Project Gateway.

Note

If you cannot access the Ingress after enabling tracing, please add the annotation nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/service-upstream: true to the Ingress.
A composed app has been created and Application Governance is enabled during its creation, so that the canary release can be performed. The sample application used in this tutorial is Bookinfo. For more information, please refer to Deploy and Access Bookinfo.

Note
If you cannot access the Ingress after enabling tracing, please add the annotation `nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/service-upstream: true` to the Ingress.

Steps

1. Create a Canary Release Task

Log in to the KubeSphere web console as the project-regular user, click Workspace Management, enter the workspace where the project is located, and click demo-project in the project list.
In the left navigation pane, select Service Mesh > Grayscale Release, and click Create on the right side of Canary Release under the Release Mode tab.
Set the task name and click Next.
On the Service Settings tab, select your application and the service to implement the canary release from the dropdown list. If you are using the sample application Bookinfo, select reviews and click Next.
On the New Version Settings tab, set the new version number v2, and modify the container image address of reviews (e.g., kubesphere/examples-bookinfo-reviews-v2:1.16.2; change v1 to v2), then click Next.
You can use specific proportions or request parameters (e.g., Http Header, Cookie, and URI) to send traffic to both versions (v1 and v2). Select Specify Traffic Distribution and drag the slider in the middle to change the traffic ratio sent to both versions (e.g., 50% each). After completing the operation, click Create.

This release task will also create a new deployment, which can be viewed on the Application Workloads > Workloads page.

2. Verify Canary Release

Now you have two available application versions. Please access the application to verify the canary release.

Visit the Bookinfo website and refresh the browser repeatedly. You will see the Book Reviews section switching between v1 and v2 versions at a 50% ratio, i.e., showing no rating or showing a rating with 5 black stars.
After the canary release task is created, it will be displayed under the Release Tasks tab. Click the task to view details.
You can see that each version receives half of the traffic.

You can also run the following command on the host running KubeSphere to directly get the virtual service and identify the weights:

kubectl -n demo-project get virtualservice -o yaml

Note

Note
When running the above command, please replace `demo-project` with your own project name. If you want to use the `kubectl` tool on the KubeSphere web console to run the command, you need to log in with the `admin` account.

When running the above command, please replace demo-project with your own project name.
If you want to use the kubectl tool on the KubeSphere web console to run the command, you need to log in with the admin account.

Expected output:

   ...
   spec:
     hosts:
     - reviews
     http:
     - route:
       - destination:
           host: reviews
           port:
             number: 9080
           subset: v1
         weight: 50
       - destination:
           host: reviews
           port:
             number: 9080
           subset: v2
         weight: 50
    ...

3. View Network Topology

Run the following command on the host running KubeSphere to introduce real traffic and simulate accessing Bookinfo every 0.5 seconds.
watch -n 0.5 "curl http://productpage.demo-project.192.168.0.2.nip.io:32277/productpage?u=normal"
Note

Please ensure that demo-project, 192.168.0.2, and 32277 are replaced with the actual values for your environment.
On the Composed Apps page, click Bookinfo to enter the details page, and click the Traffic Monitoring tab. You can see the communication, dependency, running status, and performance between different services.
Click a component (e.g., reviews), and on the right side, you can see the traffic monitoring information showing real-time data for Traffic, Success Rate, and Duration.

Note
Please ensure that `demo-project`, `192.168.0.2`, and `32277` are replaced with the actual values for your environment.

4. View Tracing Details

KubeSphere provides the distributed tracing feature based on Jaeger, used for monitoring and troubleshooting microservices-based distributed applications.

On the Tracing tab, you can clearly see all phases of the request and internal calls, as well as the duration for each phases.
Click any item to view detailed information about the request and where it was processed (on which machine or container).

5. Take Over All Traffic

If everything runs smoothly, you can direct all traffic to the new version.

Return to the Grayscale Release page, and on the Release Tasks tab, click the canary release task.
In the pop-up dialog box, click on the right side of reviews v2, and select Take Over. This means 100% of the traffic will be sent to the new version (v2).

Note

If any issues arise with the new version, select v1 to take over, and you can roll back to the previous v1 version.
Visit the Bookinfo website again, refresh the browser multiple times, and you will find that the page only displays the results of reviews v2 (i.e., ratings with black stars).

Note
If any issues arise with the new version, select v1 to take over, and you can roll back to the previous v1 version.

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