Progressive Delivery
Separating deploy from release, and exposing a change to users in controlled increments.
6 to work through
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intermediate
Your codebase has 340 feature flags. Nobody knows which are live. A recent incident was caused by an untested flag combination. How do you get out of this?
2 min answer -
advanced
A canary deployment looks healthy on average latency while a small percentage of users experience severe failures. Which signals should gate the rollout?
2 min answer -
advanced
A payments platform wants progressive delivery. What must the rollout observe, and which changes cannot be rolled out progressively at all?
2 min answer -
advanced
What should automated rollout gates measure, and how do you prevent both false confidence and false failures?
2 min answer -
advanced
Your canary analysis compares the canary's error rate against current production. Results are noisy and unreliable. What is methodologically wrong?
2 min answer -
advanced
Your service handles 40 requests per minute. Product wants canary releases with automated analysis. What do you tell them?
2 min answer
5 terms in this topic
Canary Release
Routing a small fraction of production traffic to a new version and promoting only if its metrics hold against the incumbent.
patternComparative Canary
Evaluating a canary against a simultaneously-running control group of the same size rather than against fixed thresholds, so environmental variation …
patternFeature Flag
A runtime switch that separates deploying code from releasing behaviour.
case-studyNetflix Spinnaker: Automated Canary Analysis
Netflix made canary analysis a statistical comparison run by a machine rather than an engineer watching a dashboard.
patternRelease Ring
An ordered cohort of users a change reaches before the next one, chosen so that early rings would notice a fault and tolerate it.
Neighbouring topics
Delivery & Release Engineering
General material on getting a change from commit to production safely and often.
Pipeline Architecture
Stages, fan-out, caching, and the difference between a pipeline and a long script.
Build Reproducibility
Pinned inputs and hermetic builds, so one commit cannot produce two different artifacts.
Artifact Management
Immutable versioned outputs, promotion between repositories, and retention policy.
Environment Strategy
How many environments earn their cost, what each proves, and what none of them prove.
Branching Models
GitFlow, trunk and release branches as delivery constraints rather than Git preferences.
Continuous Integration Discipline
Integrating to the mainline daily, and the test speed and review culture that requires.
Deployment Strategies
Rolling, blue-green, canary and shadow, and the traffic and state each one assumes.
Rollback & Forward Fix
When reversing is genuinely possible, and designing so that it usually is.
Database Migration Under CD
Expand-contract, backwards-compatible schema change, and migrations that cannot roll back.
GitOps
Declared desired state in version control, with a reconciler closing the gap continuously.
IaC Modules & Drift
Reusable infrastructure modules, state ownership, and detecting what changed out of band.
Policy as Code
Encoding standards as automated admission and plan-time checks instead of review comments.
Pipeline Secrets
Short-lived credentials, workload identity, and why the CI system is a prime target.
Supply-Chain Provenance
SBOMs, signed artifacts, attestation, and knowing what actually went into a build.
Deployment Gates
Automated verification between stages, and the difference between a gate and a delay.
Flow Metrics
Work in progress, flow time and flow efficiency — where a change waits rather than moves.
Change Management vs CD
Reconciling CAB-era controls with continuous delivery without pretending either away.
Multi-Region Rollout
Ordering regions, bake time, and stopping a bad change before it becomes global.