When a company like Deutsche Bank [1] signs a 10-year deal, you can be sure that they have been convinced that the products they rely on will not go anywhere.
1. Yes. This is what the article explains in the "Monitor your new pipeline before you trust it" section. This is more of a "how to get started", and when you just created your canary config, you probably don't want to trust it just yet to push to production.
2. I'm not sure I understand here. What version of your application is your canary running if you're not using it to validate a new version? The same as the baseline? But then, what are you using it for?
Author here. As mentioned in the other comments, Google is a very active contributor to Spinnaker. Today, Netflix and Google are the 2 companies contributing the most to the project, hence this sentence.