My biggest problem with 3rd party feature flag setups is that I have high expectations for them and it is technically difficult to meet all of them:
- local/static access: it should not have to call out to a 3rd party server to get basic runtime config
- unused-flag detection: flags should have three reported states: never used, recently used, not recently used. These will be different from the user-controlled states of active, inactive, etc.
- sticky a/b testing: should follow the logged in user until the flag is removed
- integration with logger: I should be able to use it with my logger out of the box to report only relevant feature flags. Alternatively can provide a packed value of all relevant flags, would probably have to do flag state versioning.
- integration with linter: should warn me if flag has not recently been used or I used a flag in the code that is not in our database (alternatively, will upsert the flag automatically if it doesn’t exist)
- hashed flag names on frontend build: prevent the leakage of information, not a perfect solution, but I would want to avoid writing “top-secret-feature” where we can.
I fully acknowledge that a lot of solutions come close, but I haven’t looked at the current state of things in the last few years so it may have improved.
- local/static access: it should not have to call out to a 3rd party server to get basic runtime config
- unused-flag detection: flags should have three reported states: never used, recently used, not recently used. These will be different from the user-controlled states of active, inactive, etc.
- sticky a/b testing: should follow the logged in user until the flag is removed
- integration with logger: I should be able to use it with my logger out of the box to report only relevant feature flags. Alternatively can provide a packed value of all relevant flags, would probably have to do flag state versioning.
- integration with linter: should warn me if flag has not recently been used or I used a flag in the code that is not in our database (alternatively, will upsert the flag automatically if it doesn’t exist)
- hashed flag names on frontend build: prevent the leakage of information, not a perfect solution, but I would want to avoid writing “top-secret-feature” where we can.
I fully acknowledge that a lot of solutions come close, but I haven’t looked at the current state of things in the last few years so it may have improved.