Running production experiments with AWS AppConfig experimentation

This article demonstrates how to run production experiments using AWS AppConfig experimentation, a feature of AWS Systems Manager that enables A/B testing without a separate platform.

• Define experiments with control and treatment variants using feature flags deployed to your environment
• Assign users or instances to treatments consistently using Entity-Id, with the AWS AppConfig Agent delivering the right variant
• Capture treatment assignments automatically via Agent logs routed through CloudWatch Logs and Firehose to your data warehouse
• Start runs at 0% exposure with overrides for validation, then ramp gradually while monitoring CloudWatch alarms as safety guardrails
• Analyze results using post-exposure attribution—joining assignment records to outcome metrics on timestamp to ensure clean causality
• Promote winning treatments by updating the feature flag while the run is active, then stopping the run to avoid user-facing gaps
• Frontend experiments test UI changes like button redesigns; backend experiments test infrastructure changes like cache TTL at the instance level
• Pay only for experiment-run hours; assignment logging and analysis use existing AWS services at their standard rates

AWS AppConfig experimentation integrates with your existing feature flag workflow and data warehouse, keeping metrics and analysis under your control while enabling data-driven decisions on production changes.