Flagger is a progressive delivery tool that automates the release process for applications running on Kubernetes. It reduces the risk of introducing a new software version in production by gradually shifting traffic to the new version while measuring metrics and running conformance tests. Flagger implements several deployment strategies (Canary releases, A/B testing, Blue/Green mirroring) using a service mesh (App Mesh, Istio, Linkerd, Kuma, Open Service Mesh) or an ingress controller (Contour, Gloo, NGINX, Skipper, Traefik, APISIX) for traffic routing. For release analysis, Flagger can query Prometheus, InfluxDB, Datadog, New Relic, CloudWatch, Stackdriver or Graphite and for alerting it uses Slack, MS Teams, Discord, and Rocket. Flagger can be configured with Kubernetes custom resources and is compatible with any CI/CD solutions made for Kubernetes. Since Flagger is declarative and reacts to Kubernetes events, it can be used in GitOps pipelines together with tools like Flux.
Features
- Canary deployments (weighted traffic)
- A/B testing (headers and cookies routing)
- Blue/Green deployments (traffic switch)
- Blue/Green deployments (traffic mirroring)
- Webhooks (acceptance/load testing)
- Manual gating (approve/pause/resume)
- Request duration check (L7 metric)
- Custom metric checks