Shadow deployment for production testing

Question

As you know, the most important parts of the test in production (TiP) are:

• Use real customer behavior / data
• Mitigate customer risk.

I found Shadow Deployment a promising approach.

With this approach, the V-next product is deployed in the manufacturing process in parallel with the V-current. When a client request arrives, the request clone is sent to V-next for testing purposes. But the result is never returned to the client. Thus, risk is not at risk. Once the V-next is ready, we can simply switch to it and take down the V-current.

So, the critical parts:

• How to implement routing logic for various projects such as web service, website, etc.
• How to isolate the generated data during the test, as it can have a side effect for upstream and downstream systems in production.

My questions:

• Is there anything else we need to take care of?
• And is there any best practice / tools / design / solution to solve these problems?

Detailed information on specific technologies can be found here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14599167/how-to-clone-iis-request-and-redirect-to-a-test-version-site

Thanks!

Answer 1

Another approach to production testing is testing on a small percentage of users or opening a new feature only for your QA production team (dark launches).

There are many tools that can help you with testing even on real users. Configz.io is a great tool for this.