New Feature - Control rollout of latest version

Grant_Stead · 07-14-2020 07:06 AM

How will this work with AWS Cognito as an Auth Source?
My base understanding of Cognito was that IF a stable version was assigned, then all Cognito users will see the stable version, else they would all see the latest version.

Austin

I don’t really see the benefit of rolling out a latest version to some random set of users? Seems like a really weird feature.

Grant_Stead

I somewhat agree, especially if you don’t know or can’t control which users those are…
I could see the value in rolling out changes to 10% of users, that way if something is really wrong, it doesn’t ruin everyone’s day…

I don’t think I would use this particular feature. But am more interested in ensuring that my AWS Cognito users will have a seamless experience per my expectations.

Steve

Ironically, that’s similar to how AppSheet (the company) does it.

Austin

It’s kinda jarring sometimes how appsheet releases a feature sometimes; you almost have to be on forum to notice some of them. I had 0 idea about this until I noticed the post. I’d be extremely jarred if someone posted about a feature that I didn’t have or vice versa. Having specific users or groups that can be on different versions is a benefit (I would love to have a “beta” version that I could let out to some users while I still work on the latest version) but the random subset would only be something I can see value in when you have thousands or more users.

Austin

Quick question, how does rounding work on this if you have less than 100 users? Up, down, nearest?

Steve

I have no idea.

Austin

Does this feature the same users on Stable or Latest? If I set it to 20% and User 1 has latest and 2,3,4,5 are on stable, would it still keep User 1 if I change to 40% and add another user?

Stefan_QREW

@Grant_Stead you can also manually add some beta users to the AppSheet Users list to give them access to the Latest Version explicitly. The AppSheet User list user_attributes trump the default attributes of your auth source. (users added in AppSheet would need to be users in your auth source for this to work)

test this out though, because I could be mistaken. It was late at night several months ago when I was testing this.

Bahbus

The benefit could be for better randomized sample of users for smaller incremental updates (non-structure changes) or brand new things to check for bugs before making it stable.

This is also how Google and many major apps roll out almost any new feature. For a recent example, a few of the native Android apps recently starting receiving their Dark mode options. There was no app update for it, the setting was just made visible to random people slowly on a server-side switch. And if no one complains about any bugs, they slowly add more, until everyone is on the new version.

Thus, any bugs that bring everything to a screeching halt should be able to be limited to just a couple users, rather than everyone.