The A/B testing strategy is based on the idea of consumer separation and providing different subsets of functionalities. A/B testing allows you to run multiple variants of functionality in parallel. With the analytics of user behavior, users can be routed to a more appropriate version. The following is a sample list of conditions that can be used in order to scatter traffic:
- Cookies
- Location
- Technology, such as the browser, screen size, and mobility
- Language
In the following image, both versions are installed, and users are routed based on their technology characteristics, that is, mobile or desktop:
The main advantage of the A/B testing strategy is that you have full control over traffic. However, distributing the traffic requires an intelligent load balancer other than the regular Kubernetes services. Some of the popular applications for this are as follows:
- Linkerd
- Traefik
- NGINX
- HAProxy
- Istio
Linkerd, Traefik, NGINX, and HAProxy are data plane applications that focus on forwarding and observing network packages between service instances. On the other hand, Istio is a control plane application that focuses on the configuration and
management of proxies that route traffic.