GitOps flow and patching

Shaped engines work with version control and CI/CD pipelines. Updates are applied incrementally with zero-downtime deployments.

How patching works

When you run shaped update-engine --file engine.yaml (or use the API), Shaped:

1. Compares configurations to identify differences
2. Only retrains or reindexes components that changed
3. Deploys updates without interrupting query serving
4. Creates a new engine version while maintaining backward compatibility

What triggers updates

Retraining:

• Changes to training block (model types, hyperparameters)
• Changes to data block affecting training data
• Changes to interaction data

Reindexing:

• Changes to index block (embeddings, lexical search fields)
• Changes to item data affecting embeddings

No retraining/reindexing:

• Changes to deployment block (scaling, resources)
• Changes to queries block (saved query definitions)
• Metadata-only changes

Best practices

• Store engine configurations in git alongside your application code
• Make small, focused changes to minimize retraining time
• Test changes in a development environment before production
• Monitor training metrics after updates

For more details, see Train a basic engine.