DevOps Articles

Moving to the Cloud Presents New Use Cases for Feature Flags

While not a new concept — https://code.flickr.net/2009/12/02/flipping-out/ post I can find about successfully using feature flags is from Flickr and now more than a decade old — commercial feature management and experimentation products are relatively new when compared to other DevOps technologies such as https://thenewstack.io/category/ci-cd/, having only come onto the market in the past half-decade or so. This example, taken from the https://launchdarkly.com/request-a-demo/?utm_content=inline-mention documentation for Java, shows what this looks like: boolean showFeature = client.boolVariation("your.feature.key", user, false); if (showFeature) { // application code to show the feature

By contrast, testing in production enables your QA team to gain real-world insights about how a given feature actually performs.

In light of this, it is important, when considering a vendor-based solution, to factor in what the product offers to allow better management of flags.

“Using feature flags, they were able to test out whether that service was able to save them money.