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Shadow deployment

By Updated

A release stage in which a new model or system receives live inputs but its outputs are not used, so its behaviour on real traffic can be compared with the incumbent or with human decisions before any exposure. The disagreement log is its evidence.

Developed in
ch. 15, Progressive delivery as a control
ch. 05, Pattern: Staged Rollout with Rollback Criteria
Chapters
ch. 05, Patterns · ch. 14, Development · ch. 15, Deployment
Contrast with
Canary release
Source
Defined by this Body of Knowledge: the section it is developed in is the source

Where it is used

The term is not used under this name in running prose; the sections listed under "Developed in" treat it.

  • Blue-green deployment

    Two identical production environments with traffic switched between them, so a release can be rolled back by switching back.

  • Progressive delivery

    Releasing a change to a small, growing share of real traffic in stages (shadow, pilot, canary, general availability), each with rollback criteria registered…

  • Rollback criteria

    The conditions, written into the rollout plan before a release stage starts, under which the pipeline returns to the previous version automatically: a floor…

  • Version pinning

    Fixing, in the registry entry, the exact versions of the model, prompts, retrieval corpus and guardrails a deployed system uses, so what ran is known and any…

Sources

No external source: the term is coined or used in a specific sense by this Body of Knowledge, and the section linked under "Developed in" is its source.

Definitions of legal terms paraphrase the cited text, which governs. Dated statements are as of .

Cite this term

García Aibar, J. (2026). Shadow deployment. In AI Governance Engineering: The Thesis & Body of Knowledge (v0.5.0), Glossary. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22956197. https://aigovernanceengineer.com/glossary/shadow-deployment. CC BY 4.0

BibTeX

@misc{aige2026shadowdeployment,
  author  = {Jorge García Aibar},
  title   = {{Shadow deployment}},
  note    = {Glossary, AI Governance Engineering: The Thesis \& Body of Knowledge, version 0.5.0},
  year    = {2026},
  doi     = {10.5281/zenodo.22956197},
  url     = {https://aigovernanceengineer.com/glossary/shadow-deployment}
}