I have been adding features to my web app but I want to release it to only selected users, how should I do it? I have hack-ish ideas like white listing certain users and allow only these users to access it, but I can afford to do it because my user base is not big. So I want to know how do big companies do it? What is the right technique?
Sébastien Portebois
Software architect at Ubisoft
Jan Vladimir Mostert
Idea Incubator
What you're looking for is called AB Testing, in Pivotal cloud, this is almost baked into their cloud offering
Google App Engine had AB testing built in since 2012 where it allowed you to send a certain portion of your traffic to another instance.
Some companies set it up in NGINX if they're using NGINX, use the load balance feature of NGINX and if you only want 25% of traffic to go to one version and the rest to another, setup 3 entries for one server and 1 entry for the server that should only get the 25% of the traffic.
AirBNB wrote about their AB testing experience here, my guess is they wrote their own tools.
Last time I checked, you could also split traffic inside Google Analytics using metrics such as male / female, browser, country etc.
Depending on how your app is built, if you load html dynamically using JavaScript get methods, you could also add rules in there to decide which HTML to load, then you still have a single app, but the HTML differs depending on certain conditions.