I am looking for best practices and approaches of using A/B testing in microservices architecture. Our client would like to use A/B testing in one of upcoming products, it is why we should propose the set of tools and practices for that in next couple of weeks. Let me list what sort of things we use in our products at this moment:
- Cloud – Azure, AKS
- Microservices - Java 9 + Spring Boot 2.0 + Docker
- Frontend – React
- Marketing – Hotjar, Google Analytics
I can share some ideas and wishes from our customer side architects:
- They see our business processes as BPM driven where every business process consists of several activities that can be reused by another business process
- There are some expectations from their side that if we introduce business process manager for our microservices, we can change the order of activities for A/B testing. For example step 1 can be moved in the middle of the process and they can review how it makes the process more convenient for end users
I also would like you to know that:
- All of the business processes in our products are driven by UI, which means that we have UI steps that are responsible for calling backend services(through one API Gateway for every UI portal)
- Current microservices communication can be characterized as choreography as we do not have any orchestration component: commands(messaging), events(messaging), queries(REST API)
After some research and summarizing experience from the past projects I see the following ideas that can be applied for all of the items related to A/B testing:
- Using microservices proxies or Service Mesh that will let us to control microservices instances versions which will be responsible for processing incoming requests - https://dzone.com/articles/canary-deployments-ab-testing-and-microservices-wi
- Using React A/B test tool - https://pillow.codes/how-to-quickly-set-up-a-b-testing-for-react-websites-dcb321fcd1f
- Using BPMN managers for business process activities and changing their order - https://thenewstack.io/camunda-offers-a-microservices-workflow-engine-built-on-bpmn/
- Using 3rd party A/B testing tools for measuring experiments and their results https://conversionxl.com/blog/ab-testing-tools/#ab-tasty
If you have any experience of using A and B testing for described cases, I will appreciate your help.
