85 posts tagged with "feature management"

The Internet of Things (known as IoT) is a rapidly growing field that refers to the interconnection of everyday objects, devices, and systems through the internet. This allows them to collect, exchange, and process data without requiring human intervention. IoT is changing how we live, work, and interact with our environment. It affects smart homes, wearable health devices, industrial automation, and smart cities.

This interconnectedness comes with a new set of challenges for developers. How do you manage this complex ecosystem's ever-growing number of features and updates? How do you ensure your devices are always up-to-date, secure, and functioning optimally? This article explores feature management in the IoT world and some of the challenges and solutions.

The primary goal of software developers is to ensure user satisfaction with the features or updates they introduce. However, achieving this goal can be challenging without the right release strategy. The question often asked, then, is, "How can developers be certain that a new update or feature delivers optimal results to end users?"

Two strategies that can be employed to address this concern are staged rollouts and canary releases. These strategies can be implemented using feature flags, and in this article, we explore how ConfigCat, a popular feature flag provider, can be used to perform staged rollouts and canary releases.

For a long time, it was normal to initially release a new feature or update into a test environment. If the feature passed, it was then released to the production environment. While this approach was highly respected and beneficial, it introduced more complexity into software development workflows, and releases took longer to reach end-users. Fortunately, with a mechanism known as feature flagging, you can deploy directly to production and ship releases faster while maintaining reliability.

Docker is a platform that enables developers to build apps and run them in mini virtual machines called containers. As a result, developers can just focus on writing code without needing to set up or configure an environment for running that code. Docker also allows easy application sharing because its environment is abstracted away from the host machine. This allows the containerized application to run on any host machine Docker is installed on. Developers can extend the functionality of Docker's desktop application with extensions. But the goodness doesn't stop there. You can use feature flags to control smaller feature components of these extensions without rebuilding and updating them.

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.

Microservices Architecture is a revolutionary approach to software development that empowers applications to scale and evolve with unparalleled flexibility. But: How do feature flags help in this dynamic landscape of microservices?

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 becoming a prominent part of DevOps practices and for good reason. They allow you to turn features in your live application on or off without redeploying code. You might think that something so powerful would require some rocket science-level programming to implement, but you'd be surprised to know that, at their core, feature flags are booleans and if-then-else statements.

Okay, that's an oversimplification of things, but it's true. And while there are different ways of implementing feature flags, they all share this common core. That said, let's take a broader look at feature flags and their uses in modern software development.

Government agencies, with their strict security requirements, often face difficulties in fully embracing DevSecOps practices. Balancing the need for rapid feature releases with robust security measures poses a challenge. Feature flags offer a promising solution in this context. By seamlessly integrating into DevOps and DevSecOps pipelines, they can empower government agencies to effectively manage feature releases while maintaining high levels of security.

Adding new features to existing applications used to mean that code pushed into production automatically updated the entire app. This raises security risks to the existing application, because a single bug could have catastrophic consequences. This risk can be reduced by implementing a secure feature management architecture that allows code updates with increased flexibility and the power to easily switch between versions.