What We Talk About When We Talk About Feature Flagging

When most developers think about feature flags they think about an on/off switch to toggle a new feature, or maybe if they're fancy a percentage rollout. But feature flags can be so complex! There are endless possibilities when feature flags aren't just a switch, but provide a user interface for decision points and configuration in code. I think about feature flags as long-lived dynamic configuration handlers, and our team has used them to build a web page using a binary tree of flags, configure rate-limiting per customer, and more.

This talk will cover:

• How feature flags can be more than a simple on/off switch
• Some particularly interesting use cases I've seen for non-traditional feature flags:
• The aforementioned binary tree of flags
• Per-account rate limiting configuration

At the end of this talk, the audience will understand how feature flags are traditionally used, and how changing the way they think about flagging can make flags more powerful.