Version management

Scenarios

Version management is typically used in canary testing and validation.

Version management involves the following steps:

1. Purchase a Premium or Enterprise plan and enable version management.

2. Create environments. Environments include development environments, staging environments, and production environments.

3. Clone an existing configuration version to create a new version and modify the configuration of the new version.

4. Deploy the new version to the intended environment, test the version, or promote the version to the next environment.

Environments

ESA allows you to test your different website configuration versions in separate environments. When current rules of a website no longer suit your business requirements, you can deploy a new version in a separate environment.

After you enable version management, you can create an environment that suits your needs.

The default environment is a production environment. ESA supports the following environments:

• Development environment: an environment where you can change the configuration settings.

• Staging environment: an environment where you can test and validate configuration changes before these changes are applied to the production environment.

• Production environment: an environment where all your website configurations are applied. You cannot modify the traffic filters of the environment or delete the environment.

When you clone an existing version as a new version, the common practice is to deploy the new version first to a development environment, then to a staging environment for testing, and if everything works as expected, finally to the production environment.

Versions

After version management is enabled for a website, ESA dynamically divides website configurations into version-level configurations and global configurations for the website.

When you enable version management for a website, ESA automatically creates version 0 for the website.

Version 0 has all configuration settings of the website. Version 0 is automatically deployed to the default environment to avoid affecting your live traffic.

You cannot directly create a version. You must clone an existing version to create a version. The new version initially has configurations that are identical to the version that was cloned.

After a version is ready, we recommend that you deploy the version to the environment with the lowest priority (development environment) and gradually promote the version to the environment with the highest priority (production environment).

Availability

Through version management, you can create a new configuration version by cloning an existing version. The rules within a website configuration version consume resources against the total quota of the plan.