Canary deploys are a crucial tool for modern software teams to roll out new changes reliably and minimize customer impact when they go wrong. At New Relic, we believe canaries provide the most effective means of deploying new services with minimal disruption. Effective canary deployments require finding the right balance between three concerns: canary time, canary size, and metric selection. By following nine best practices, including always using canaries with deploys, timing canary deploys with traffic cycles, and evaluating canaries on core metrics like error rates and response times, teams can ensure successful canary deployments that minimize disruption to users and infrastructure. These best practices make sense for organizations of various scales and complexities, but it's essential to tailor them to individual needs and environments.