Smoke Test
A quick, basic test run after deployment to verify the most critical paths still work. If the smoke test fails, the deployment is rolled back immediately.
What is Smoke Test?
A quick, basic test run after deployment to verify the most critical paths still work. If the smoke test fails, the deployment is rolled back immediately.
Smoke Test is a intermediate-level concept that sits in the DevOps & CI/CD area of system design. Engineers reach for it whenever they need to reason about real-world trade-offs in that space — not just for textbook correctness, but because real production systems at companies like Netflix, Amazon, and Google make these decisions every day.
If you want to go deeper than this definition — with diagrams, code, and a quiz to lock it in — work through the "Smoke Test" lesson linked below. It walks through the why, the mechanism, the trade-offs, and how the giants actually use it in production.
Learn Smoke Test in depth
Full interactive lesson with diagrams, code examples, real-world references, and a quiz.
Open the Smoke Test lessonRelated lessons
Lessons that touch on Smoke Test as part of a larger topic.
See also
Related glossary terms you might want to look up next.
CI/CD
Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment: automating the process of testing and deploying code. Push code, tests run, and it ships to production automatically.
Canary Deployment
Rolling out a new version to a small percentage of users first, then gradually increasing. Like sending a canary into a coal mine to test for danger.
Rolling Deployment
Gradually replacing old instances with new ones, a few at a time. No downtime, but both versions run simultaneously during the rollout.