Progressive delivery

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Progressive delivery is an evolution of continuous delivery that adds two controls on top of "the code is in production": progressive rollout — exposure expands in stages rather than all at once — and progressive delegation — control over each release shifts from engineering toward product and support as confidence grows. Feature flags, canary releases, and percentage rollouts are its building blocks.

The two halves: progressive rollout and progressive delegation

The term, coined by RedMonk analyst James Governor in 2018, named a pattern teams were already converging on. The first half, progressive rollout, means a release reaches users in widening rings — internal staff, then a canary, then 10%, then everyone — each tier gated on healthy metrics. The second half, progressive delegation, means the power to flip a feature on moves outward over time: engineering ships it dark, then product decides when to reveal it, then support can toggle it per customer. Feature flags are what make both halves a configuration decision rather than a deployment.

How it differs from continuous delivery

Continuous delivery gets code to production safely and often; it stops at deploy. Progressive delivery picks up where it ends, treating release as a separate, gradual, reversible act. In practice that means deploying behind a flag (a dark launch), ramping with a percentage rollout, and keeping a kill switch ready. For a worked example of staging a rollout, see progressive rollouts in practice.

Want the full picture? Read the concept guide: Rollout strategies →

Related terms

Canary release

A canary release exposes a new version to a small group of users first and watches its metrics before rolling it out to everyone — so problems surface on a fraction of traffic instead of the whole fleet.

Percentage rollout

A percentage rollout serves a feature to a defined share of users — chosen by a deterministic hash — so the same users stay in the cohort as you ramp the percentage up.

Dark launch

A dark launch ships a feature to production turned off or invisible to users, so the code runs in the live environment before anyone sees it — you reveal it later on your own schedule.

Browse the full feature flag glossary →

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