3 posts tagged with "serverless"

In monolithic applications, every change requires redeploying the entire system. Now, imagine pushing a payment processing update to your e-commerce platform during peak traffic. A bug slips through. You deploy a fix. That fix introduces another issue. Suddenly, you're rolling back the whole application under pressure.

Microservices reduce that blast radius by breaking systems into smaller, independently deployable services. When you combine microservices with feature flags, you gain something even more powerful: the ability to change production behavior without redeploying code. If one service misbehaves, you don't redeploy. You disable the feature. You stabilize and fix forward. That level of runtime control is what makes feature flags essential in distributed systems.

In this guide, we'll explore how feature flags work in microservices and serverless architectures, and walk through a practical example using AWS Lambda, .NET, Redis, and ConfigCat.

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.

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.