A Telemetry-Driven Model for Quantifying Upgrade Risk in Durable Workflow Execution

Durable workflow engines reconstruct execution state by deterministically replaying an immutable event log, coupling every in-flight run to the code version that produced its history: a new deployment can invalidate the replay of runs started under the old version, silently corrupting state or halting progress. Existing mitigations -- pinning, patch gates, side-by-side deployment -- treat every change as maximally dangerous and drain old versions, untenable for workflows that sleep for weeks. We present a closed-form probabilistic model that quantifies the risk of upgrading in-flight runs from workflow version $V_1$ to $V_2$ using only a static structural diff and telemetry the protocol already persists -- event logs, step payloads, historical paths -- with no dry-run, sandbox, or shadow execution. Risk decomposes along three axes (protocol, interface, state migration) and combines an exact backward (rehydration) term, computed on recorded prefixes modulo trace equivalence of concurrent completions, with a probabilistic forward term from hitting probabilities in an empirically estimated Markov model of control flow. Estimation is Bayesian throughout, so the Workflow Upgrade Risk (WUR) score carries a credible interval and thin telemetry surfaces as uncertainty. We prove that a zero backward-risk verdict certifies safe rehydration under the new version, and derive a policy partitioning runs into migrate, review, and pin classes. Finally we drop the inter-run independence assumption: coupling through hooks, hierarchy, and shared resources is captured by an empirical coupling graph, fleet risk becomes the least fixpoint of a failure-contagion operator, and the coupling-aware migrate/pin partition is computed exactly as a minimum s-t cut.