<quote name="Tomasz Finc" date="2015-02-06" time="14:04:55 -0800">
CC'ing Greg to help us think how to approach percentage based releases and what would be in our way to do them.
Hi there!
On Tue, Jan 27, 2015 at 1:18 PM, Jon Katz jkatz@wikimedia.org wrote:
Jon, Are there any technical reasons not to explore the % rollout model for collections instead of beta?
I'd love to see what you come up with for this that takes into account all of the oddities of our deployment system as it is (ie: versions of mediawiki and extensions are different depending on which wiki you visit).
Jon or whoever (Sam?) can you include me and my team in your explorations here? I want to figure out something that we can do, even if for only a limited sub-set of things, to make percentage based rollouts possible.
The "real" answer is something along the lines of what Facebook does: * No artificial distinction in code version depending on site * All servers serving the same code for all users (except during deployments, which are also percentage based, but that's handled at the LVS laye) * Staff are transparently sent to the staging build * Features can be turned on by region/percentage/etc with the toggle of a button (enabled by Gatekeeper, which is basically fancy feature flag toggling. It gives a PM or whoever a UI to turn the dials on who sees what when. See: https://www.quora.com/How-does-Facebooks-Gatekeeper-service-work?share=1
We aren't there yet :) So anything you can think of that works reliably might be useful here.
Can someone start a conversation with my team/ops as needed? Feel free to bring strawmen proposals!
Thanks!