GovCMS is introducing the new canary initiative as part of our initial release testing for the GovCMS distribution. Over the next couple of months, you will see your dashboard highlighting this new information where we are extending our current canaries to include all SaaS websites.
The canary branches are protected environments primarily for GovCMS internal use only. The environments are automatically built and deployed and conduct nightly testing on the upcoming changes in the distribution.
What is a canary initiative and how does it help?
Canaries are used to imitate any kind of device within a website. They can pretend to be almost anything. For example, if something was attempting to attack a file in your system and engaged with a canary device (pretending to be the file), it would not only study the behaviour of the attacker but send an alert to the system administrator. This allows whoever oversees the file, to be notified of the attack and take the required precautions to stop it from happening again.
There is no action required for the GovCMS SaaS Community. This has no impact on your website or other feature branches. This branch does not count towards your maximum number of environments in your project. You may see over the next couple of days on your dashboard that GovCMS have created the environment. However, you may view the environment and see how the changes in an upcoming release will affect your website.
More Information
If you have any concerns or questions about these changes, please reach out by raising a Service Desk(Opens in a new tab/window) ticket. Don’t forget to stay up to date by subscribing to our GovCMS Status page(Opens in a new tab/window)!