Ask HN: Do you use a feature flag system? What does it look like? I‘m in the process of setting up feature flags and curious of existing experiences. Which systems worked, which didn’t, and how would you set one up if you were to do so today? Any software you can recommend? |
It's been pretty helpful for us moving our analytics queries from mongoDB to clickhouse.
Most companies seem to prefer launchdarkly or similar, but I have seen this setup work great at big international websites with loads of traffic.
For my smaller projects I’ve used simple kv stores and user id lookups to handle it. Works fine.
Depends how advanced you want to go honestly. If you want to go bonkers use LD. If you want something simple like literally serve X user Y content you could set something up yourself in 30 minutes.
I simply use GulpJS with the removeIf plugin, which completely adds/removes the code of the feature.
Where I work, those feature flags are used to deploy a feature for a single application "run time", i.e. a country, which has its own cloud and everything.
BTW have you read the article on feature flags on Fowler's website? Could help you form some opinions https://martinfowler.com/articles/feature-toggles.html