2 min lesson
Incremental cutover beats big-bang
Imagine this comes up at work: "You're sequencing a serving-stack migration at 1M+ DAU and an engineer proposes a single weekend big-bang cutover to 'rip the bandaid off.' How do you respond?" Start with the practical move.
Step 1 of 3
Incremental cutover beats big-bangblast radius is the metric
When you migrate a serving stack at production scale, the question is never “did it work” but “how many users felt it if it didn't.” Big-bang cutover bets the whole user base on a single switch. Incremental cutover bets 1%, watches, then 5%, then 25%.
Interactive diagram. Step through it with the Next and Previous controls below, or Tab to a region to read its detail.
diagram: flow
Each gate is a guardrail-metric check, not a timer - you advance on evidence, with rollback kept hot the whole way.