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Migrate a production AI application by treating the new model as a change to the whole application, not a drop-in replacement: establish a reproducible baseline, check compatibility and capacity, evaluate the candidate, expose it gradually, and keep a tested route back to the stable version. No rollout method can guarantee identical answers; the goal is to find regressions before they affect many users and make recovery fast if they do.

1. Establish a baseline you can reproduce

Before changing production, record the current model and serving configuration alongside the parts of the application that shape its behavior. Include prompts, tool definitions, structured-output assumptions, application code, and the version of the evaluation dataset. Preserve the current implementation as a known-good control.

AWS preproduction guidance recommends treating prompts and model configurations as versioned artifacts and linking deployments, evaluation runs, and traces to a code commit. That makes a validated application version a snapshot of the stack, rather than a model name alone. Version the test data too: otherwise a difference in evaluation results may come from changed examples rather than changed model behavior.

Build a representative evaluation set

Use cases drawn from the application’s real task mix and known failure modes. Include ordinary requests as well as long or ambiguous inputs, edge cases, tool and integration paths, safety or refusal cases, and user-reported failures. Evaluate dimensions that matter to the product—such as correctness, faithfulness, relevance, format compliance, task completion, and safety—and set acceptance thresholds before looking at candidate results.

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Run the current production version and candidate against the same versioned cases. Automated scores help identify regressions, but they do not reproduce every user interaction or judge every quality dimension reliably. Use human review for consequential or subjective cases, and make the gate explicit: which checks must pass, who owns them, and what happens when they do not.

2. Verify compatibility and capacity before routing traffic

Check the candidate in the actual account and deployment environment. Confirm that it supports the API and modalities the application uses, along with required tools, structured responses, context needs, regions, and account access. A matching model name or provider is not proof that the integration will behave the same way.

Availability, quotas, endpoint support, and retirement dates can change. For Amazon Bedrock, consult the lifecycle information for the specific model and region: Bedrock states that its lifecycle dates can differ from a model provider’s dates, and migration to an active model does not happen automatically when a Bedrock model reaches end of life. Those lifecycle details apply to Bedrock, not to every provider.

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Load-test representative request and response sizes, concurrency, and latency before increasing live exposure. Request counts alone may not predict capacity when input sizes and generated response lengths vary. Bedrock’s quota guidance discusses bounded concurrency, queues, token-aware limits, and gradual ramping; the exact quota mechanics are service-specific, but measuring the replacement’s resource profile is a general requirement.

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3. Choose a rollout method for the risk you need to manage

Offline evaluation is the first gate, not a substitute for live validation. Choose any production traffic pattern based on whether the main question is output quality, user outcomes, blast-radius control, or operational readiness. The methods can be combined.

Method Candidate exposure to users Best suited to Main consideration
Offline evaluation None Repeatable comparison on a fixed, versioned test set May miss live behavior and changes in the request mix. (AWS Prescriptive Guidance; AWS preproduction guidance)
Shadow traffic None; only the current model’s answer is served Comparing candidate outputs, latency, and cost on copied live requests Adds inference load. Review privacy, data-retention, and side-effect controls before duplicating production inputs. (AWS Prescriptive Guidance)
Canary A limited share, increased in stages Testing the actual user experience while limiting initial exposure Requires live gates and a quick route to restore the stable version. AWS Prescriptive Guidance gives 1–5% of traffic as an illustrative canary group; its publication year is not stated, and this is not a universal threshold. (AWS Prescriptive Guidance)
A/B test Users are assigned to variants Comparing outcomes such as task completion, feedback, or conversion Define comparable cohorts, an appropriate duration, and enough observations; a traffic share alone does not establish statistical significance. AWS gives 5% of traffic as an example of a small A/B share; its publication year is not stated, and it is not a universal sample-size rule. (AWS Prescriptive Guidance)
Blue/green Users move to the candidate at a controlled switch Validating a parallel environment and keeping a clear operational switch Both environments need to be available during the transition. (AWS Prescriptive Guidance)

Shadow traffic is useful when candidate answers must be inspected without showing them to users. A/B testing is designed to compare user outcomes; a canary constrains initial blast radius while you validate live behavior. Blue/green emphasizes a controlled switch between parallel deployments. None eliminates the need for offline gates or monitoring.

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4. Define promotion gates and recovery before launch

For each release gate, name an owner, the observation window, the success threshold, the abort threshold, and the action that follows a failure. Choose thresholds for this application’s risk and service objectives; AWS guidance does not establish a universal SLO, canary share, hold time, or rollback threshold.

Watch technical and user signals together. Depending on the application, that means error and timeout rates, latency percentiles, cost or token consumption, capacity, quality signals, and user outcomes such as task completion or feedback. Do not wait for aggregate satisfaction to fall if a pre-agreed critical metric has already degraded.

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Keep the last stable deployment addressable and prepare a traffic switch or feature flag that can restore it. Separately define what the application should do if that model is unavailable too: a fallback response or heuristic is not the same as rolling back to the previous deployment. AWS Prescriptive Guidance recommends runbooks for rollback and fallback strategies. Rehearse the chosen procedure so recovery is an operational action rather than an improvised code change.

Use staged promotion

  1. Pass offline gates: Compare the candidate with the production control on the same evaluation data and review failures against the predefined thresholds.
  2. Compare safely in production: Use shadow traffic or another limited live method when it answers an unresolved question; verify privacy and side-effect controls before copying requests.
  3. Begin limited exposure: Route only the planned eligible traffic to the candidate and inspect agreed quality and operational signals throughout the observation window.
  4. Expand only while gates hold: Increase exposure in controlled increments. If a critical threshold is breached, execute the preselected rollback or fallback action rather than continuing the ramp.
  5. Declare the new stable version: After promotion, retain the previous version for the recovery period your team has set and keep monitoring the candidate at full exposure.

This staged sequence follows AWS guidance on evaluation gates, canary promotion, and gradual traffic ramping. The increment sizes and observation times must be chosen for the application; the guidance does not prescribe universal values.

5. Keep the evaluation current after cutover

Continue monitoring after all traffic has moved. Turn newly observed failures and useful user feedback into evaluation cases, then version the expanded dataset. AWS preproduction guidance recommends adding real-world examples and user-reported failures so later model changes are compared against the problems users actually encounter.

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