The Billion Versions of Facebook You've Never Seen

At the July Test in Production Meetup, Girish Patangay from Facebook discussed how the company manages different versions of its platform using Gatekeeper. He explained that each user has a slightly different version of the software due to this tool, which is used throughout their entire stack. The talk covered various uses of Gatekeeper, including testing and rollout, policy and laws compliance, load testing, and experimentation. Patangay also introduced Quick Experiment, a tool built on top of Gatekeeper that enables developers to launch experiments quickly and efficiently across all platforms. He highlighted the importance of limiting audience size for experiments, dividing user bases into segments, and using real-time analytics tools like Scuba to analyze results. The challenges discussed included managing costs associated with experiments and dealing with lingering issues on mobile devices.