Who Controls Change Once It's Live?

Rollouts start automatically but usually stop only when a human notices something is wrong. Once a change is live, there is rarely a clearly defined owner for its ongoing safety.

In practice, this means:

• Alerts are noisy and easy to ignore or delay.
• On-call engineers are the last line of defense under pressure.
• Rollbacks happen after users feel the impact, not before.
• So-called automatic strategies still depend on humans to design complex wiring for every scenario.

The structural issue is simple. Runtime safety decisions require a combination of:

• metrics that reflect live conditions,
• clear safety boundaries,
• timing and windows,
• scoped reactions that do not punish the entire system.

Most teams do not have the time or appetite to build a dedicated safety engine, so the problem is pushed to operators and ad-hoc scripts. The result is fragile and inconsistent runtime control.

Rollouts start automatically but usually stop only when a human notices something is wrong. Once a change is live, there is rarely a clearly defined owner for its ongoing safety.

RCP was designed to take ownership of these live decisions instead of leaving them to chance.