Comment by Jan Vladimir Mostert on "How to rollout features to only a certain section of users?"

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.

Thanks a lot. This helped me understand what I should look for.

Hello
Indeed, for a first try, using NGINX is very easy to setup and can be done on a % base, on geolocation, on IP (useful to test things only with some selected users), not a full-fledge solution like complete A/B testing solutions, but with a very minimal investment required.

If you're using AWS, you can even use Route53 to route your traffic differently for some users to one version or another (I'm not familiar with Google Cloud of Azure and others, but it's likely they also offer similar features)

Google Cloud has something built in which allows you to send visitors from a certain region to certain instances - region-based load balancing. Google's equivalent of Route53 is Cloud DNS, not sure if they offer AB-testing via DNS - Network Load balancing might be able to do it since it allows you to specify routes which can take IPs, regions and ports. Didn't know you could use NGINX load balancing via IP / GEO Location, that sounds very useful!

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