Canary releases and progressive delivery have improved how we introduce changes, but they mostly focus on short-lived checks around rollout time. They rarely address whether the change remains safe over hours and days in a dynamic system.
Canary Tests End — Runtime Risk Continues
A canary might pass a five-minute experiment while traffic is low and dependencies are calm, yet trigger cascading failures later when the environment shifts. Downstream services might saturate, caches may behave differently, and user behavior may concentrate load in unexpected ways.
The industry response today is reactive:
But the pattern repeats because the underlying assumption has not changed: a brief canary test is treated as sufficient proof of long-term safety.
A canary might pass a five-minute experiment while traffic is low and dependencies are calm, yet trigger cascading failures later when the environment shifts.
What is missing is a continuous runtime safety contract that stays active after the rollout completes. RCP treats each change as a living contract, not a one-time experiment.
Want to see how RCP solves this?
Email us at bparanj@zepho.com.