What Is Progressive Delivery?
Progressive delivery is a release approach that exposes a new version to users incrementally, starting with a small slice and widening as health metrics stay good. It combines techniques like canary releases, feature flags, and automated rollbacks. The goal is to limit the blast radius of any bad change while still delivering quickly.
Why it matters
All-at-once releases turn every bug into a full-scale incident. Progressive delivery makes rollout a controlled dial, so a regression is caught at 1% of traffic instead of 100%, and rollback is fast because most users never saw the change.
Related concepts
- Canary analysis is a key technique
- Feature flags decouple deploy from release
- Dark launches and shadow traffic extend the idea
Related guides
What Is Canary Analysis?Canary analysis compares a new release serving a small slice of traffic against the stable version to decide…
What Is a Dark Launch?A dark launch ships a feature to production turned off or hidden, so it can be tested in the real environment…
What Is Shadow Traffic?Shadow traffic mirrors real production requests to a new version in parallel, without using its responses, to…