Add a new Rollout rule

What are Rollout Rules?

The Rollout planner gives you granular control over your releases and tests. You can activate or deactivate any feature flag at any time for specific users.

Rollout rules are like conditional statements for your releases and experiments. You can set up a sequence of actions that triggers under certain conditions. These rules can be scheduled, applied immediately, targeted to specific groups, reordered, and customized to align with your goals.

Add a new rule

Click Add a rule to open the rule configuration menu.

Here, you can choose between delivery or testing rules, and name your rule.

You can combine rules of any type to implement your feature's rollout strategy. Kameleoon lets you add rules for Targeted Delivery, Progressive Delivery and Feature Experiments.

How does the rule queue work?

Once you’ve added your rollout rules, it is important to understand how Kameleoon evaluates the queue:

• Kameleoon will check if your flag is on or off. If it's off, visitors will see the default variation (which you can choose in the "Then, for everyone else in production, serve" dropdown list).
• If the flag is turned on, Kameleoon evaluates experiments and rules in the queue in a top-to-bottom order. Keep this in mind when planning your rollout strategy to prevent unforeseen targeting overlaps.
• New rules are added to the bottom of the queue by default. However, you can manually reorder rules by clicking and dragging its card to a new position. Reordeing rules in the queue will also change the order in which Kameleoon reads and evaluates the rule. Be mindful when delivering rules that share the same audience.

• Paused rules are simple ignored at runtime.

User Targeting and Bucketing

When a user is exposed to a variation, it follows a two-step process: targeting and bucketing. Targeting means the user meets the conditions specified in a rule. Bucketing means the user has been assigned to the variation(s) associated with that rule.

Kameleoon handles targeting and bucketing differently for delivery and experiment rules.

Consider these two scenarios:

Scenario 1: Delivery Rule at the top

If a visitor is first targeted for Targeted/Progressive Delivery rule:

• They receive the selected variation if they are bucketed.
• If targeted, but not bucketed, the visitor will receive the "Everyone else" variation and won’t be evaluated for any other rule.

Scenario 2: Experiment Rule at the top

• If a visitor is targeted by Experiment rule:
  • They receive the selected variation if they are bucketed.
  • If they are targeted, but not bucketed, the next rule is checked until the end of the queue. All users who are not bucketed by experiment rules move down the queue. Because of this, it’s always a good practice to keep experiments at the top of your queue

note

Changing the traffic split for an experiment does not change the total size of your experiment bucket. For example, let's say you launch an experiment that targets 20% of a user segment with a variation split of 50/50 for its two variations. If you update the split to 60/40 or 90/10, but do not change the percentage of traffic that will be included in the experiment sample (20%), the total bucketed users will not increase or decrease. Instead, some bucketed users will get exposed to a different variation.

When there are no more rules in the queue, all remaining users will receive the "Everyone else" variation.

Rule states

All rules in the queue will display one of these states:

• Active (is currently live)
• Paused
• Planned (has been scheduled to start and/or stop at a given date/time). Planned rule changes to active at the defined schedule or outdated at the end of it.
• Unsaved changes (this also includes new rules that are in the draft state)
• Outdated (a planned rule that automatically turned off at scheduled end date). Outdated rules are not shown in the default view, but you can use filters to view them.

Pause or resume a rule

To pause a rule, click the three-dots menu on an experiment's card and click Pause.

Paused rules are ignored at runtime. You can resume the rule later in the same menu.

Copy rules from another environment

You can also add rules you created in another environment. Copying rules lets you replicate your rollout/experiment setup from, for example, your staging environment to your production environment.

Select Copy when adding rules in your destination environment and select the source environment in the next step.

You'll have the option to append the copied rules at the bottom of your rules queue, or replace all existing rules with the copied rules.

Rollout summary

This section provides an overview of variations and segments.

Changing the cards' order, deleting a rule, or changing a rule's status will affect the ordering and values inside summary cards.

While the summary section accounts for untargeted (remaining) users that can be passed down to the next rule, any partial or complete overlaps between different user segments across different rules won't be accounted for or identified.

Variations Summary

This section provides an overview of which variations have been used in your delivery and experiment rules.

Variations that are targeting multiple segments have multiple bars displaying the percentage of the audience you have targeted.

Segments Summary

This section summarizes the different user segments that are being targeted in your rollout rules.

Variations assigned to a segment will be combined to reach a maximum of 100%. If this limit is exceeded, any remaining variations will be ignored.

Using the Rollout Planner with outdated SDKs

If your SDK's version does not support Feature Variations, you will have to keep a few things in mind when adding new rules for a feature flag:

• Kameleoon will only check the rules defined in the Production environment. Rules you created in the staging or development environments will be ignored.
• Kameleoon will only evaluate the first rule in the queue. If there are any rules below, they will be ignored. If there are no rules at all, the default variation defined in your rollout will be served.
• Only the default variations On and Off are supported.
• Start/Stop scheduling of rules is not supported.

Visit Kameleoon's Github and subscribe to notifications to stay up to date with all SDK releases.