Have you ever wondered why some of your friends get to see the latest Facebook messenger or Gmail upgrade before you do? Why do some people get to play with the newest features weeks before others? And, why do these features sometimes disappear within a week? The answer is a dark launch.
Facebook and Google, along with many leading tech giants, use dark launches to gradually release and test new features to a small set of their users before releasing to everyone. This lets them see if you love it or hate it and assess how it impacts their system’s performance. Facebook calls their dark launching tool “Gatekeeper” because it controls consumer access to each new feature.Dark launching is the process of gradually rolling out production-ready features to a select set of users before a full release. This allows development teams to get user feedback early on, test bugs, and also stress test infrastructure performance. A direct result of continuous delivery, this method of release helps in faster, more iterative releases that ensure that application performance does not get affected and that the release is well received by customers.
It is called a dark launch because these feature launches are typically not publicized, but rather, they are stealthily rolled out to 1 percent, then 5 percent, then 30 percent of users and so on. Sometimes, a new feature will dark launch for a few days and then you will never see it again. Likely, this is because it did not perform well or the company just wanted to get some initial feedback to guide development.In 2011, Facebook rolled out a slew of new features – timeline, ticker and music functionalities – to its 500 million users spread across the globe. The huge traffic that was generated on Facebook following the release led to a server meltdown. The features that were rolled out garnered mixed response from users which led to inconclusive results of the effectiveness of the new features, leaving them with no actionable insights.This led to an evaluation and reassessment of strategies, resulting in Facebook coming up with the Dark Launching Technique. Using the DevOps principles, Facebook created the following methodology for the launch of its new releases.
During Dark Launch one deployment pipeline is turned on to deploy the new features to a select set of users. The remaining hundreds of pipelines are all turned off at this point. The specific user base on which the features have been deployed are continuously monitored to collect feedback and identify bugs. These bugs and feedback will be incorporated in development, tested and deployed on the same user base until the features becomes stable. Once stability is achieved, the features will be gradually deployed on other user bases by turning on other deployment pipelines.
Facebook does this by wrapping code in a feature flag or feature toggle which is used to control who gets to see the new feature and when. This exposes pain points and areas of the application’s infrastructure that needs attention prior to the full-fledged launch while still simulating the full effect of launching the code to users. Once the features are stable, they are deployed to the rest of the users over multiple releases.
This way Facebook has a controlled or stable mechanism for developing new functionality to its massive user base. On the contrary if the feature does not get a good response they have an option to rollback on their deployments altogether. This also helps them to prepare their servers for deployment as they can predict the user activity on their website and they can scale up their servers accordingly.
Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google, along with many leading tech giants, use dark launches to gradually release and test new features to a small set of their users before releasing to everyone.The intention of DevOps is to create better-quality software more quickly and with more reliability while inviting greater communication and collaboration between teams. It is also an automation process that allows quick, safe and high quality software development and release while keeping all the stakeholders in the loop. This is the real reason why DevOps is seeing an all-time high adoption leading to increasing career opportunities in DevOps.
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