Canary Testing

You can use Portkey’s AI gateway to also canary test new models or prompts in different environments.

This feature is available on all Portkey plans.

This uses the same techniques as load balancing but to achieve a different outcome.

Example: Test Llama2 on 5% of the traffic

Let’s take an example where we want to introduce llama2 in our systems (through Anyscale) but we’re not sure of the impact. We can create a config specifically for this use case to test llama2 in production.

The config object would look like this

{
  "strategy": {
      "mode": "loadbalance"
  },
  "targets": [
    {
      "virtual_key": "openai-virtual-key",
      "weight": 0.95
    },
    {
      "virtual_key": "anyscale-virtual-key",
      "weight": 0.05,
      "override_params": {
          "model": "meta-llama/Llama-2-70b-chat-hf"
    }
  ]
}

Here we are telling the gateway to send 5% of the traffic to anyscale’s hosted llama2-70b model. Portkey handles all the request transforms to make sure you don’t have to change your code.

You can now use this config like this in your requests.

Once data starts flowing in, we can use Portkey’s analytics dashboards to see the impact of the new model on cost, latency, errors and feedback.