How can i Simulate SHUTDOWN of Parse.com to measure its imapact?

Question

I Have 4 apps backed by Parse.com live on PlayStore having 5+ million user base. When Parse.com decided to shut down their support we have migrated our backend to Heroku successfully and rolled out updates for apps (More updates, more % of migration). There are still plenty of users who are using the older version of apps(not update their app having Heroku integrated)

Now the Parse.com shutdown coming closer(28 Jan 2017) and we want to simulate actual disaster which will give us the cases of the users who use the app after parse.com shuts down.

Any suggestions will be appreciated, Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Hopefully this helps, but this is what we have done to simulate a shutdown:

1. Setup a local proxy in our network that maps the old server url https://api.parse.com/1/ to a web application on our local network that always returns HTTP 500 and/or HTTP 4xx. In addition, and importantly, we test SSL certificate failures as well (we used CloudFlare for this).
2. We would then run the old clients on our local wifi, which would cause them to hit our 'fake' shutdown server which would respond with 500, 4xx and SSL failures given our test configurations.
3. For files that are hosted on Parse, you will get an HTTP 403 Access Denied XML response from Amazon S3, which is easy to test out.

If you can't setup a local proxy but are using the newest Parse SDK, you could always change the Parse server url you are utilizing in your code to a machine available in the network or using an ngrok tunnel that returns those error codes.

According to Facebook, Android users on average take about ~80 days to upgrade to the latest version of your app, iOS about ~40 days. It is always a good idea to implement a 'force upgrade' feature on your application in the event you ever need to use it, which a Parse.com shutdown scenario seems fitting for it.