CloudBees: Deploy 2 different versions of the same WAR to different app instances

Question

Is this possible? I'm trying to achieve a partial production release whereby, if my app has (say) 6 instances up and running, I could deploy a new version out to only 1 or 2 of them and turn sticky sessions on.

That way, the first time a user gets "stuck" to a an instance with my new app version, they'll always get it. This way I can monitor how the new version is doing for a few days before deciding to go with a full release, or to back out the new version, and only impact a small percentage of my users.

If it is possible, I'm looking for what kind of config params I need to use to only deploy the new version to specific nodes/app instances.

Answer 1

This isn't possible on cloudbees. Deploying a new version will start a new set of servers with the new binaries (deployment don't override existing servers, it creates a fresh new infrastructure, then stop the active one)

Seems you're trying to setup some A/B testing process ?

What you need is another application ID with the new version, get some users redirected here, and use blue/green switch so that all users use the latest one when you're fine with the new app usage stats.

Cloudbees platform don't (yet) provide any routing algorithm to help implementing traffic switch between A and B apps. Maybe your DNS provider can handle this ? Workaround is for you to have application A redirect some % of traffic to B.