Progressive Delivery is emerging as a worthy successor to Continuous Delivery by enabling developers to control how new features are launched to end users. Its wide popularity is owed to the demand for faster and more reliable software releases. The increasing emphasis on customer experience has begun to push the Continuous Delivery methodology by the wayside. Large enterprises like Netflix, Amazon, and Uber are turning to Progressive Delivery to test and release code in a phased and controlled manner.
In a nutshell, Progressive Delivery empowers developers to plan and implement code changes to a subset of users and then expand it to all users. The progressive rollout of features is executed through techniques like blue-green deployment, feature flagging, and canary deployments. You can mitigate issues that come up by promoting a version to all users only when you’re confident that it is performant and reliable. If it fails in production, the impact radius is restricted to a subset of users, and the update can be rolled back immediately.