7 Reasons Percentage Rollouts Reduce Deployment Risk

Deploying new features in high-volume production environments can be risky due to potential bugs or issues affecting users. A percentage rollout strategy gradually introduces a feature to an increasing percentage of users over time, allowing for better control and observation during the release process. This approach is often used with feature flags, which are toggles or switches that allow developers to easily toggle code execution for specific user subsets without needing to redeploy. There are various rollout strategies, including full rollouts (big-bang adoption), canary releases, ring deployment, entitlement releases, and targeted releases. Percentage rollouts minimize risks by being safe and flexible, limiting the scope of errors, providing a kill switch for easy rollback, enabling feature refinement through iterative feedback, meeting customer expectations with quicker feedback cycles, saving development costs, and facilitating application in a progressive delivery pipeline. Major companies like Facebook, Microsoft, and Google use percentage rollouts as part of their progressive delivery strategies when launching new features. Feature flags enable developers to safely implement this approach by allowing for controlled, gradual introduction of new code and features with reduced risks.