DevOps Glossary

Progressive Delivery is a software release approach that rolls out changes gradually to users, traffic, or environments instead of shipping every change to everyone at once. In practice, it uses feature flags, canary releases, phased rollouts, automated tests, and production monitoring so teams can control exposure, reduce blast radius, and catch issues early. For example, a team might release a new checkout flow to 1% of users, monitor error rates, latency, and conversion, then expand to 10%, 50%, and 100% if the signals stay healthy. Progressive Delivery helps teams ship more safely and recover faster, but it requires reliable observability, clear rollback paths, and discipline around flag cleanup. It is closely related to continuous delivery, but it focuses more on who receives a change, when they receive it, and how risk is managed after deployment, which makes it useful for teams dealing with startup delivery bottlenecks.