Release Management - releasing to a subset of users - how would it work for a public facing website

Question

I read somewhere (sorry don\'t exactly remember the source) that facebook has release Tuesdays. They release the new features to their internal employees first, then to a sm

Answer 1

Option 1:

A (sub)domain for the (semi)(public?) devsite. Certain users are accepted on the devsite based on a manual set cookie (employees etc) < private testing

The main domain which sets cookie for certain users (cookie set when time is between time X and time Y) < depending on your traffic. If you get 1000 (unique)visitors every hour and you want 10% on the dev domain you make sure the delta time is 6 minutes. You can simply delete the cookies when you want users to be redirected to the normal site.(make sure you redirect the whole incoming url to prevent broken bookmarks.

Option 2:

Loadbalancing a certain percentage of the traffic to servers running new app.

Database

1:Interact with live database while developing < regular backups + regular skilled devs = safe

2: look at master slave replication to create a "live" shadow copy of your DB