678443 - [One Mozilla] Test a Small % of Traffic Before a Full Release?

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(www.mozilla.org :: General, defect)

Description

[mcbmoz]

All,

Would it be possible for us to send a small % of traffic to the merged site before going full throttle?

This would allow us a little time to gauge any problems that might occur when the full stream of traffic from mozilla.com and mozilla-europe.org are sent to mozilla.org/firefox and those localized product pages.

It may not be possible, but Steven brought it up today and if it's possible it would be a prudent move indeed!

Add thoughts please!

Comment 1

[Laura Forrest]

This is prudent. I'd recommend something like a "soft launch" of 20% of traffic, then rolling out to the rest.

Comment 2

[Fred Wenzel [:wenzel]]

I am not opposed to it at all, but can't currently think of a way how this would be possible with our current (servers and software) setup. Since we run the new setup on the very same servers, they can't serve both the old and new setup at the same time. And if we did something in htaccess like we do for A/B tests, I fear we're compromising the validity of the QA signoff on the merged site, unless we set it up accordingly there first, then re-QA.

But perhaps I am missing something. Can someone from IT weigh in?

Comment 3

[Fred Wenzel [:wenzel]]

(In reply to Fred Wenzel [:wenzel] from comment #2)
> unless we set it up accordingly there first, then re-QA.

By "there" I mean on stage.

Comment 4

[Fred Wenzel [:wenzel]]

CCing oremj for words of wisdom.

Comment 5

[mcbmoz]

(In reply to Fred Wenzel [:wenzel] from comment #4)
> CCing oremj for words of wisdom.

Fred, thanks for chiming in! If it's not possible, no worries - looks like we'll have a rollback plan ready on deck if things are dire and a design for mozilla.org with dowload capability too.

Jeremy, this is more of a "nice to have" for us, in an attempt to do due diligence :-) 

~cb

Comment 6

[Corey Shields [:cshields]]

(In reply to Fred Wenzel [:wenzel] from comment #2)
> I am not opposed to it at all, but can't currently think of a way how this
> would be possible with our current (servers and software) setup. Since we
> run the new setup on the very same servers, they can't serve both the old
> and new setup at the same time. And if we did something in htaccess like we
> do for A/B tests, I fear we're compromising the validity of the QA signoff
> on the merged site, unless we set it up accordingly there first, then re-QA.
> 
> But perhaps I am missing something. Can someone from IT weigh in?

Sorry, been firefighting all week.

I'm quick to say "not possible today" but this is something we need to work toward (which is akin to how Facebook and others roll out new features).

Fred, let's touch base Mon or Tue.  I'll be in the office.  Need to intro you to a new guy anyway.

Comment 7

[Jake Maul [:jakem]]

I don't know of a good way offhand to do this for the whole thing, but we might be able to do something like this for the redirects from .com -> .org. That is, we might be able to have the redirects trigger for certain IPs, but not most IPs. This would let certain people (like QA) test out the redirects before they go live... not sure we can feasibly do it for a certain percentage of traffic.

We'll want a better solution in the future, but this might be better than nothing for this time.

Comment 8

[mcbmoz]

Thanks for circling back, closing as resolved, definitely something to work towards in our future:)