How can I simulate SHUTDOWN of Parse.com to measure my imapact?

Question

I have 4 apps supported by Parse.com live on the PlayStore with 5+ million users. When Parse.com decided to close its support, we successfully migrated our server to Heroku and made updates for applications (more updates, more% of migration). There are many more users who use an older version of applications (without updating their application with Heroku integration)

Now the closure of Parse.com is approaching (January 28, 2017), and we want to simulate the actual disaster that will give us cases of users using the application after parse.com disconnects.

Any suggestions would be appreciated, thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Hope this helps, but this is what we did to simulate a shutdown:

• Configure a local proxy on our network that maps the old https://api.parse.com/1/ server URL to a web application on our local network that always returns HTTP 500 and / or HTTP 4xx. In addition, and, importantly, we also check for SSL certificate errors (we used CloudFlare for this).
• Then we launched the old clients on our local wifi, which will lead to their hit on our "fake" shutdown server, which will respond with errors of 500, 4xx and SSL, given our test configurations.
• For files hosted on Parse, you will receive the HTTP 403 Access Denied XML protocol from Amazon S3, which is easy to verify.

If you cannot configure the local proxy server but use the latest Parse SDK, you can always change the URL of the analysis server that you use in your code to a machine accessible on the network or using ngrok that returns these error codes.

According to Facebook, Android users on average take about 80 days to upgrade to the latest version of your application, iOS about ~ 40 days. It is always recommended that you implement the “power refresh” feature in your application in case you ever need to use it, which is similar to the Parse.com shutdown scenario.