Usually I've seen it as, you have some system with replicated jobs, and you update the code or config for a few of the jobs and wait before doing the rest. It is sort of a public staging. You can also canary native binaries pushed to clients, which is a different mechanism but the same idea, you're 99...% sure the change is safe but still better not to globally release it.

I guess your case isn't the same idea since you're not testing with real usage, it's your own staging tests. But I don't see anything wrong with that.