How do the guys like Google/Gmail/Facebook do incremental releases? For example, on the implementation side, what do they do to roll out features to a subset of customers? I can think of two possible implementations:
- Effectively put
if
statements around code on both the front-end and the back-end. - If you have customer affinity for certain application servers, you could deploy to just a subset of application servers.
The first just seems kind of hacky to me, and the second seems hard if you are using an RDBMS for your backend store.