Kong Canary Release Routes No Traffic

You encounter a kong configuration issue that prevents your workflow from completing. This guide walks through the fix step by step.

Wrong ❌

# Using canary plugin without proper weight
curl -X POST http://localhost:8001/routes/my-route/plugins --data "name=canary" --data "config.weight=0"

Wrong Output

Canary receives zero traffic. Weight=0 means no requests forwarded to canary upstream.

Right ✅

# Create canary upstream
curl -X POST http://localhost:8001/upstreams --data "name=canary-upstream"
curl -X POST http://localhost:8001/upstreams/canary-upstream/targets --data "target=canary-backend:3000" --data "weight=100"
# Create main upstream
curl -X POST http://localhost:8001/upstreams --data "name=main-upstream"
curl -X POST http://localhost:8001/upstreams/main-upstream/targets --data "target=main-backend:3000" --data "weight=100"
# Enable canary plugin with hash-based routing
curl -X POST http://localhost:8001/routes/my-route/plugins --data "name=canary" --data "config.weight=10" --data "config.upstream_host=canary-upstream" --data "config.hash=consumer"

Right Output

10% of traffic routed to canary upstream. Hash ensures consistent routing per consumer.

Prevention

• Set canary weight between 1-50 to start.
• Use hash-based routing (consumer, ip) for consistent canary assignment.
• Define both main and canary upstreams.
• Monitor error rates for both upstreams.
• Gradually increase weight as confidence grows.

DodaTech applies similar defensive patterns across Doda Browser, DodaZIP, and Durga Antivirus Pro infrastructure for production reliability.

Common Mistakes with canary release

1. Using foldl instead of foldl' causing stack overflow on large lists
2. Forgetting deriving (Show, Eq) on custom data types needed for debugging
3. Placing the wildcard pattern first in case expressions, making all subsequent patterns unreachable

These mistakes appear frequently in real-world KONG code. DodaTech's contributors have identified these patterns through analysis of open-source projects and production systems.

Practice Exercise

Write a pure function that safely divides two integers using Maybe, then test it with edge cases like division by zero and negative numbers.

This exercise reinforces the concepts covered in this guide. Try implementing it before checking online solutions.

FAQ

This quick fix is part of the DodaTech infrastructure engineering series. Learn more at DodaTech tutorials.