DEPLOYMENT ARCHITECTURES

RELEASE STRATEGIES AND GRADUAL ROLLOUT A release is the act of putting a new version into production. Agents are tricky to release because small changes to a prompt or a model version can change behavior in unexpected ways. Strategies for lowering the risk include these. Gradual rollout, also called a staged or canary release: send the new version to a small slice of traffic first, watch carefully, and increase the slice only if all is well. The name comes from canaries once carried into coal mines as an early warning of bad air. Blue-green deployment: keep two full environments, one live and one idle with the new version; switch traffic over and switch back instantly if there is a problem. Feature flags: switches that turn a feature on or off without redeploying code, allowing quick shutdown of a risky feature. Shadow mode: the new version runs alongside the old on real traffic, but its outputs are recorded rather than shown to users, so you can compare. A/B testing: different users get different versions so results can be measured side by side. Automatic rollback: pre-set conditions, such as error rate above a threshold, automatically return traffic to the old version. For agents, remember that a rollout covers not only code but prompts, tool definitions, model versions, and configuration. All of these should be versioned, meaning each has an identifier and a history, so that you can say exactly what was live at any time and restore a prior state.