Ablator's top concept is the App. An App can have multiple Functionalities, which are individual features of your application that you want to manage in ablator. Not all of your app's features have to be present in ablator, only those you want to manage and roll out in a controlled way.
A Functionality can have one or more Flavors. If only one Flavor is present, the Functionality is a binary affair: Either your users have it enabled, or not. If multiple Flavors are present, you can present your users different variants of the same feature, e.g. for use in A/B or Red/Green testing.
To start, define a new App, giving it a name and a slug. The name is for use in the web interface, whereas the slug identifies the feature to the API and client libraries. Add a few Functionalities to your new app -- each Functionality should describe a distinct feature of your app. Give your Functionality one Flavor (named, e.g., "on") to use ablator as a simple on/off switch. Give it more Flavors to randomly distribute your users between them.
Here are some examples for Functionalities and Flavors:
- an intro screen that pops up to inform users about your app (one Flavor named "on")
- a new settings tab (one Flavor named
full-settings, one namedsimple-settings) - your app's new color scheme (Flavors named
red,green, andblue)
To roll out your new Functionality, you need to set a release strategy. Possible options are
| Recall Functionality: | Oops, you made a mistake. All users will have that functionality revoked, even those who had it enabled in some form before. |
|---|---|
| Pause Roll Out: | All new users will get the functionality disabled, but users who already had the functionality will get to keep it. |
| Enable Globally: | Once you're satisfied the functionality works as intended and doesn't overwhelm your servers, use this roll out strategy to enable it for all users. |
| As defined by Releases: | During the rolling out process, it makes sense to have more fine-grained control over how your Functionality is enabled. Add one or more Release objects to your Functionality to configure those more fine-grained options. |
A Release, in ablator terms, is a stretch of time that during which a certain set of rules are defined how many and which users should be allowed to get a Flavor switched on for them. Right now, Releases can define a maximum number of users, which enables you to define slow roll out. Ablator will only allow that many users to have the Functionality enabled, and will randomly distribute them among the available Flavors. In the future, it's planned to make Releases even more configurable.