KCNA Cloud Native Application Delivery Practice Question
Which deployment strategy is characterized by gradually shifting traffic from an old version to a new version of an application, often requiring a service mesh or ingress controller to manage traffic splitting?
⚠ Common exam trap
KCNA often tests the distinction between canary and rolling update — the trap is assuming any gradual rollout is a canary, when the defining feature of canary is percentage-based traffic splitting via a mesh or ingress controller.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Canary deployment
A canary deployment gradually shifts a small percentage of traffic to the new version while the majority still hits the old version, allowing observation of metrics before full rollout. This traffic splitting is typically implemented via a service mesh (Istio, Linkerd) or an ingress controller (NGINX, Traefik) that supports weighted routing.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Rolling update
Why it's wrong here
A rolling update replaces pods incrementally within a Deployment but splits traffic by pod count, not by weighted percentages, and needs no service mesh or ingress controller. It is tempting because it also avoids downtime, which suits routine stateless application updates where gradual percentage-based canary analysis is unnecessary.
- ✓
Canary deployment
Why this is correct
Canary deployment routes a small percentage of live traffic to the new version while the remainder still reaches the old one, then shifts that weighting gradually. This satisfies the stem's requirement for traffic splitting, which needs a service mesh or ingress controller to manipulate routing weights at the network layer.
- ✗
Blue-green deployment
Why it's wrong here
Blue-green switches all traffic at once between two identical environments, so it cannot gradually shift a percentage of requests. It is tempting because it also uses two versions and an ingress or load balancer, which suits scenarios needing instant rollback rather than progressive traffic splitting.
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Recreate
Why it's wrong here
Recreate stops all old pods before starting new ones, causing downtime with no traffic splitting mechanism at all. It is tempting because it is the simplest strategy and guarantees no two versions run concurrently, which suits development environments where brief outages are acceptable and version overlap must be avoided.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Cloud Native Application Design Principles
Key term
Service Mesh
A service mesh is a dedicated infrastructure layer that manages communication between microservices, handling tasks like service discovery, load balancing, encryption, and observability without requiring changes to application code.
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Written and reviewed by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
Last reviewed September 2026 · checked against the official CNCF exam blueprint
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