9 Best Practices for Release Management

When most people hear “feature flag,” they probably think of a flag that controls who can see a feature and when. In fact though, release management is one of the most common use cases for feature flags.

Whether you call it early access, a canary release, or a beta, giving a select group of users access to features prior to release helps you fine-tune a feature before releasing it to everyone. Starting small and rolling out to larger groups over time helps you:

• Observe the behavior of the systems and services under increasing load
• Collect user feedback and make changes if you need to
• Limit the blast radius if something goes wrong

A release management flag is intentionally short-lived. Once 100% of users have access to the feature, remove the flag.