LLM Model Canary Release in Production: Reducing Version Drift with Shadow Traffic, Compatibility Gates, and Auto-Rollback
When model providers update, internal fine-tuning changes, or prompts are upgraded, online behavior can silently drift. This article covers the engineering practices of LLM canary releases—shadow traffic, compatibility gates, canary metrics, version registration, and auto-rollback—to help teams build a behavior-compatible release pipeline.