A canary deployment is a pattern that reduces the risk of introducing a new software version in production by slowly rolling out the change to a small subset of users before rolling it out to the entire infrastructure. It's an effective strategy to prevent outages since it allows for monitoring and quick rollback if issues arise without affecting all users.
Reference: Canary releases are part of deployment strategies that can help mitigate the risk of outages during updates, a concept included in the CompTIA Cloud+ curriculum.