Skip to main content

COMPEL Glossary / shadow-traffic

Shadow traffic

A deployment pattern in which a new model or prompt version receives a copy of live traffic and produces outputs that are captured for evaluation but not returned to users.

What this means in practice

Enables realistic pre-release testing without user-visible risk; extended in AI contexts to include side-by-side evaluation against the incumbent model.

Synonyms

shadow deployment , mirror traffic , dark traffic

See also

  • Evaluation harness — The infrastructure that runs capability, regression, safety, and human-review evaluations on an LLM feature on a defined cadence.
  • Continuous delivery (ML) — Automated, governed promotion of models through lifecycle stages — development, staging, production — with gated checkpoints (evaluation thresholds, bias checks, cost thresholds, human approval where required).
  • SLI/SLO for AI — Service-level indicators and objectives for AI systems — including evaluation score, per-task cost, and goal-achievement rate alongside classical availability/latency.