Case Study: HolidayCheck achieves automated, safe canary releases on GKE with Traefik Labs

HolidayCheck - Customer Case study

HolidayCheck, the largest independent hotel review and booking and booking portal in the German-speaking area, needed a lower-toil, less error-prone way to deliver frequent microservice updates on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). To implement automated canary releases and traffic splitting without a full service mesh, HolidayCheck used Traefik Labs’ Traefik v1.7 as the single ingress proxy to route and weight traffic between main, canary, and control deployments.

Traefik Labs’ service-weight routing plus a HolidayCheck canary controller automated replica scaling and Ingress updates so CI/CD pipelines could promote, demote, or rollback releases based on comparative metrics — for example, splitting 20% of traffic from a 10-replica service yields two replicas each for canary and control. The implementation reduced manual operations and human error, enabled data-driven canary decisions using application-level metrics, and delivered a slim, GKE-native canary workflow with Traefik Labs without introducing the complexity of a service mesh.

HolidayCheck