Field Notes from a Canary That Nobody Was Watching

The canary deployment worked perfectly, degraded visibly for four hours, and rolled forward anyway because watching it was everyone’s job and therefore nobody’s.

The canary did its job: it degraded early and observably. The rollout proceeded on schedule anyway, because the schedule had an owner and the canary’s signals did not.

What a watched canary requires

• A named person who owns the go or no-go for each phase.
• Abort criteria written before the rollout, not negotiated during it.
• A rollout that cannot advance without an explicit acknowledgment.

Use the benchmarks, changelog, and contributing guide to pair every canary with an owner and an abort rule.