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Policy lifecycle

This page defines safe lifecycle management for gate policies and bundles.

Lifecycle entities​

  • Policy: rule definition (rate, quota, seats).
  • Bundle: packaging set of policies.
  • Account bundle binding: effective runtime selection for a billing account.

Lifecycle states​

Bundle states:

  • active
  • disabled

Policy states:

  • default
  • assignable
  • ceiling
  • disabled

Only active bundles and non-disabled policies are evaluated at runtime.

Versioning strategy​

For predictable rollout, prefer bundle-level versioning:

  1. create a new bundle key (or managed version suffix)
  2. copy baseline policies
  3. apply policy changes in the new bundle
  4. verify behavior on controlled accounts
  5. move assignments to the new bundle
  6. disable old bundle after migration

This avoids in-place policy mutation risk during live traffic.

Safe change rules​

  • Keep policy names unique per realm.
  • Do not mix unrelated changes (rate, quota, seats, wildcard) in one rollout step.
  • Keep default and ceiling semantics explicit and stable for a feature/window tuple.
  • Validate seat policy impact before rollout when limit_count is finite.

Rollback strategy​

  • Roll back by re-pointing accounts to previous known-good bundle.
  • Keep old bundle active until rollback window closes.
  • Use deterministic assignment windows so support can explain historical behavior.

Governance checklist​

  • Every bundle change is auditable by author, reason, and effective window.
  • Every high-impact policy has canary accounts before broad rollout.
  • Every rollout has explicit rollback target.

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