Canary Release

A canary release gradually shifts a small percentage of live traffic — typically 1–5% — from the current model or prompt configuration to a new version, allowing teams to measure real-world quality and cost before full rollout. Monitoring the canary on live traffic catches regressions that offline evaluation suites miss because they cannot replicate the full distribution of production queries. If the canary's metrics match or exceed the baseline, the rollout percentage is incrementally increased until migration is complete.