Overview
/silver:canary orchestrates partial traffic rollouts — canary deployments, blue-green slices, feature-flagged exposure, and staged percentage rollouts. It maps to catalog entity WF-SILVER-CANARY (specialized type) in the v0.48.3 APO catalog.
Canary omits AF-SECURE from the deploy chain because security review is expected to have passed during the build phase; the workflow focuses on blast-radius documentation, slice-level verification, and controlled ship progression. For full production promotion without traffic splitting, use /silver:deploy.
Standard composition:
/silver:devops or /silver:feature for the change that produces the canary candidate.
When to Use
Entry trigger signals for /silver:canary and canary:
- Percentage-based or traffic-sliced rollout to production
- Canary deployment with automatic rollback on error-rate thresholds
- Blue-green cutover after validating the idle slice
- Feature-flag gradual exposure with observability gates
Catalog Composition
| Atomic flow | Command | Outcome |
|---|---|---|
AF-BLAST-RADIUS | /silver:blast-radius | Slice impact map, rollback triggers, observability requirements |
AF-VERIFY | /silver:verify | Canary health — error rates, latency SLOs, synthetic checks on the traffic slice |
AF-SHIP | /silver:ship | Controlled promotion to next slice or full traffic with audit trail |
Workflow Steps
AF-BLAST-RADIUS — Define slice boundaries
Documents which users, regions, or traffic percentages receive the canary, failure thresholds that trigger rollback, and operator escalation paths.
AF-VERIFY — Monitor canary health
Runs verification against the active slice: metrics dashboards, synthetic probes, and comparison against baseline. Verification must pass before widening traffic.
AF-SHIP — Advance or rollback
Records ship evidence for the current slice. On success, either widens the rollout or completes full promotion. On failure, executes documented rollback.
Example Invocation
Silver Bullet routes to WF-SILVER-CANARY. Blast-radius documents the 5% slice and rollback triggers. Verification monitors error rate and p99 against baseline. Ship gate advances to 25% only after evidence passes.