Incremental stream switching in distributed systems

Techniques for incremental stream switching in a distributed system with flip events are described. A special-purpose flip event is inserted into an event stream that indicates, to recipients of the stream, whether they are to switch to use of an alternate event stream. The flip event may identify which other event stream to use, how to obtain events of that event stream, when to switch to the other event stream, and/or whether that particular recipient is to switch. The recipients may be selectively or iteratively migrated using flip events targeting different recipients, limiting the blast radius of a switch. Via use of a tracking data structure, event replay and event skips can be avoided.