A/B Testing with LineRate Proxy

Professional application owners in enterprises have a common problem when it comes to making enhancements to the applications they support: what is the most effective way to push application layer traffic management into the network without potentially compromising the existing carefully managed hardware traffic managers, rolling their own traffic management solutions, or changing their production deployments? One example of this is how to conduct user acceptance testing of new functionality when users aren’t committed to using staging environments?

Agile organizations solve the user acceptance testing problem with a well-known pattern called A/B Testing. A/B Testing allows them to test design changes and backend implementation while maintaining the ability to easily rollback to the existing production site.

F5 provides the ideal Application Layer SDN solution with LineRate Proxy’s programmable datapath. Implementing A/B Testing for production environments is as easy as loading an instance of the LineRate Proxy virtual appliance and the appropriate datapath script(s). In the A/B testing example, F5’s DevOps team is now able to indicate which users should be steered to the beta site while giving IT/Ops the confidence that the transition will occur in a controlled manner.

Learn more about this deployment of LineRate Proxy, including actual script code by reading this technical brief.