You work for a travel company that books accommodation for customers. The company has decided to release a new feature that will allow customers to book accommodation in real-time through their API. As a developer, you have planned to deploy this new feature. How will you test the new API feature with minimal impact to customers?

Answer options:

A.Create a stage and inform your pilot customers to change their endpoint.
B.Create a stage and inform your pilot customers to change their endpoint and attach a usage plan.
C.Create a stage and enable canary release.
D.Create a stage and promote a canary release.

Answer: C
Option A is incorrect because setting up the stage and informing your customers to change their endpoint will affect them by adding downtime on their side.
Option B is incorrect as the same as above but adding the usage plan only helps throttle requests. It will still affect the customers.
Option C is CORRECT as enabling canary release will allow the developer to route a % of the traffic to the new API in a random order ensuring no one customer is affected too long. Canary release is a part of a stage in the API Gateway console.
Option D is incorrect because promoting a canary release will make the deployment release, thereby having no delta between the canary and base stage. If this option is selected, all customers will be affected.
Reference:
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2017/11/amazon-api-gateway-supports-canary-release-deployments/
Further, read
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/apigateway/latest/developerguide/canary-release.html