What is shadow deployment, and how does it differ from canary and A/B testing?
Shadow deployment validates a new model on real traffic without exposing users to it. What matters is knowing outputs run in parallel then get discarded, and how it complements canary and A/B. Here is the answer.
Updated Sep 2026 · Grounded in real GenAI, LLM, and AI/ML engineering interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.
Shadow deployment validates a new model on real traffic without exposing users to it. What matters is knowing outputs run in parallel then get discarded, and how it complements canary and A/B. Here is the answer.
Lead with where the obvious approach breaks, because that is the judgment they are screening for — most candidates jump straight to the happy path and lose the room.
Then walk the failure back through the pipeline in order, naming the one metric the customer's exec sponsor actually cares about before you propose the fix.
