Staged rollout

Deploying an agent to a small slice of the real workload first, often in shadow mode where it proposes actions without taking them, and widening only as evidence accumulates. Staged rollout is containment across time: it bounds the damage of an unanticipated failure to a small population before it can reach everyone.

A deployment practice for software updates in which a new version is released first to a small subset of a fleet, monitored for regressions during a defined window, and only released to the full fleet if no problems appear, reducing the risk that a single flawed update affects every deployed unit simultaneously.

Deploying a production system to one named group first, with monitoring and a rollback plan, before expanding, rather than jumping from a pilot straight to organization-wide deployment. The disciplined alternative to the all-at-once launch that the pilot-to-production gap punishes.

Deploying a change to production in sequential stages of increasing scope (a canary group, then a larger percentage, then everyone) rather than all at once, so that a problem missed by pre-deployment checks is caught before it reaches the full population.