What Is Canary Bake Time?

Canary bake time is the period a canary deployment serves a slice of real traffic before the system decides to promote or roll it back. The wait exists so that enough requests and metrics accumulate to distinguish a healthy release from a subtly broken one. Too short a bake and rare faults slip through.

Why it matters

Promoting a canary the instant it looks fine risks missing errors that only surface under volume or specific conditions. A deliberate bake time gives monitoring a fair chance to detect regressions before full rollout. Setting it too long, though, slows delivery and ties up duplicate capacity, so it is a tuned trade-off.

Related guides