Canary releases are a deployment strategy used to test new versions of an application on a small subset of users before rolling them out to everyone, minimizing the risk of introducing negative impacts. Edge Stack API Gateway offers precise control over canary releases by employing a weighted round-robin method for distributing traffic across various services. The `weight` attribute determines the proportion of traffic to be directed to a specific resource via a particular mapping, which is balanced by Edge Stack to ensure that the total weight of all mappings associated with a resource equals 100%. This allows for incremental testing of new features in the production environment, following their validation in development or local test environments, and introduces changes to the production with minimal risk and higher confidence in the new version's stability.