Chavez Harris

As a front-end developer, I spend most of my time writing code and developing front-end applications. Several months ago, I wondered what it would be like to run a tech startup. It turns out that I spend my spare time writing blog articles for such a company. Meet ConfigCat, a thriving tech startup that offers a cloud-hosted feature flagging solution to other tech companies.

Most importantly, I was curious to know how the company was created and the secret behind its success, as well as how they are able to handle high-end user demands while delivering a seamless feature flagging solution. To answer these questions, I decided to conduct an online interview with the core engineering team to satisfy my curiosity and to share what I found with you, the reader.

One of the most important technological breakthroughs of the century has been the internet — a digital network that makes the rest of the world feel like our next-door neighbor. Within the realm of the Internet, a recent technology known as cloud computing has paved the way for software developers to rent and manage remote servers in the cloud for hosting their applications. A smaller component of this technology is called Function as a Service, abbreviated as FaaS. FaaS removes the complexity of managing a full-blown backend server, enabling developers to focus solely on writing and executing the necessary functions required to run their applications.

When FaaS and feature flags are combined, you can toggle individual functions or code blocks in those functions on or off without touching its code. Let's take a closer look.

Feature flags are essential for effective feature release and management. Using them, we can control what features end users can see and which should remain hidden. Feature flagging allows developers to plan, launch and test new features remotely without editing code. While these benefits are fantastic, what about code testing? Having some methods in place for testing the integration of feature flags in our code can increase the likelihood of smooth feature integrations.

According to an article published by CNET, the growth of the gaming industry is expected to increase. Due to this, new game titles are on the rise as greater demands are placed on gaming companies to remain competitive by keeping their users engaged with new features and updates. With the proper feature flagging mechanism, new features and updates can be effectively managed and released to users.

Ever since the dawn of feature releases, feature flags have become the de facto standard for managing and controlling features in software applications. Many software development methodologies these days such as agile, are heavily focused on releasing continuous updates and features. In addition, a few companies have based their entire business around serving clients a cloud-based feature flagging solution. But in limited bandwidth situations or when you need to optimize the performance of your client-facing applications making API requests may not be ideal. This can be handled by implementing a process called caching with the help of a popular tool called Redis.

It can be time-consuming to create and manage the infrastructure that drives your software applications as they grow and become larger. Also, what about ongoing updates and releases of new features? Luckily, there is a solution to this problem in the form of a tool designed by Hashicorp called Terraform. This allows us to define our infrastructure in a central configuration file without having to create it on every provider platform we use.

The primary goal of many software companies today is to keep end users engaged with their software by releasing new features and updates. This is made possible via a mechanism known as feature flagging. As software applications grow and scale to the ever-increasing demand for new features, another problem arises. It is easy to lose track of where we use feature flags throughout our code. This results in forgetting to remove them when their features have been fully implemented and deployed. How do we fix this?

Continuous Integration (CI) is a process by which new features and updates are continuously added to an application to keep it updated and secure. At the end of each cycle, the changes are deployed to end users. To prevent human errors, various automated tools are chained together to carry out this process. CircleCI is a broader tool that facilitates this, and it also provides an automated solution for managing your feature flags.

Continuous Integration and Continuous Development/Deployment, most commonly abbreviated as CI/CD has changed and improved the way modern software is developed and shipped. When compared to traditional approaches which had a definite end, the CI/CD process is always ongoing with a strong emphasis on automation. As a result, new features and updates are steadily released to end users. This puts a huge overhead on developers and stakeholders to manage features efficiently. But, with the right feature management tool in place, this can be streamlined and simplified without much overhead, if any at all.

With the rise of cloud computing, Function as a Service (FaaS) services are becoming quite popular in the software industry. This is in part due to them not requiring the setup and implementation of a backend server to process and respond to data requests. This allows developers to focus on doing what they do best, writing better code.

By integrating such a service with feature flags, you can expand the way your functions work by toggling functionalities on or off and even rolling them back if anything goes wrong. Added to that, there is no limit on the number of feature flags you can implement, and they can be integrated into just about any language and framework out there.