Beyond a single canary
Progressive delivery is the discipline of releasing change in widening stages, each one gated by health checks before the next begins. It generalizes the canary into a full pipeline: a tiny first wave, then larger ones, with an automatic stop and roll back if any wave looks unhealthy.
The stages
- Wave one exposes the change to a small population such as internal users.
- Wave two widens to a single region or a few percent of traffic.
- Later waves ramp toward one hundred percent, pausing at each gate.
Between waves a bake time lets slow signals like memory leaks or error spikes surface before more users are exposed.
Why staging matters
Each gate is a chance to catch a problem while its blast radius is still small. Combined with feature flags and canary analysis, progressive delivery makes a risky change into a series of small, reversible steps.
Key idea
Progressive delivery ramps a change through health gated waves so problems are caught while the blast radius is still small.