How Frontline Education Reduced Production Risk with Controlled Releases Using ConfigCat
Supporting mission-critical school systems with safer rollouts
Running software for schools is a bit like running a classroom. There are a lot of moving parts, a lot of people involved, and when something goes wrong, it does not go unnoticed.
Frontline Education operates in exactly this kind of environment. Their platform supports thousands of school districts and millions of users across the United States. Administrators, educators, and staff rely on it every day to keep school operations running smoothly.
That kind of responsibility changes how you think about releases. Shipping fast still matters, but stability matters more. Instead of rushing changes into production, the team needed a way to introduce them carefully, with control at every step. That's where feature flags became essential.
Your Cat-Scan Summary
Overview
Industry
Education Technology (EdTech)
Company Size
501-1,000 employees
Using ConfigCat Since
2021
Use Case
Controlled releases, feature flags across backend and frontend, release management
Key Wins
Reduced production risk, safer rollouts, environment-level control
Who is behind the flag?
About Frontline Education
Frontline Education has been building software for schools since 1998. Its mission is to transform how schools work so every educator and student succeeds. Guided by its vision of every school thriving and every community stronger, Frontline partners with K-12 education communities with solutions that support human capital management, student services, and school business operations.
Today, Frontline serves thousands of school districts and millions of users across the United States. Its broad product portfolio and deep education expertise help districts streamline operations, gain greater visibility into their workforce and programs, and create more time to focus on student success.
With a large customer base across K-12 education, Frontline serves millions of end users. Because their systems support real school workflows every day, reliability is non-negotiable.
Their ambition is to continue modernizing their platform architecture, improve cross-product integration, and deliver a more unified user experience. At the same time, they are focused on improving scalability, reliability, and release velocity while reducing operational risk.
The Purr-fect Stack
Bringing Systems Together Without Adding Chaos
Frontline's architecture is primarily AWS-based and combines modern cloud-native services with long standing enterprise systems that support critical district operations. Multiple engineering teams work across different product pillars, which adds both flexibility and complexity.
To simplify this, their innovation efforts focus on platform consolidation. The goal is to reduce unnecessary complexity and make administration easier for schools, so they can focus more on student outcomes.
Feature flags play an important role in making this possible. They are used across both backend services and web-based frontend applications, allowing teams to control how and when features are released without depending on deployments.
Before ConfigCat Walked In
The Challenge: Growing Complexity and Increasing Risk
As the platform grew, releasing new functionality became more difficult to manage. The team needed to deliver new features quickly, but they were running into familiar problems:
- New features went live the moment code was deployed
- There was no easy way to limit exposure
- Rolling back meant redeploying
- Testing in real conditions was difficult
“We wanted to decouple deployment from release, reduce production risk, and gain the ability to control feature rollout more precisely.”
Without that separation, every deployment required a higher degree of coordination and validation. In systems used daily by schools, reliability and predictability are essential.
How the Cat Saved the Day
The Solution: Controlled Releases with Feature Flags
Introducing ConfigCat changed how Frontline Education approached release management. Instead of pushing features live immediately, they could release them gradually and intentionally.
Here's what that looks like in practice:
- Code can go to production without exposing features right away
- Features can be rolled out gradually instead of all at once
- Specific user groups (or internal teams) can get early access
- Features can be disabled instantly if unexpected behavior is detected
Over time, they also discovered the real value of more advanced rollout strategies.
“We mainly use targeting rules and on/off toggles. Over time, we've come to appreciate how targeting enables more controlled rollouts compared to simple feature switches.”
The Cat in Action
What Controlled Releases Look Like in Practice
Today, feature flags are part of Frontline's daily development workflow. They use ConfigCat to introduce new functionality in a controlled, measurable way across both backend and frontend systems.
Their real-world usage reflects common high-impact release strategies:
- Enabling functionality for internal users or specific customer segments before broader release
- Controlling feature availability by environment (e.g., development, staging, production)
- Deploying code to production while keeping features disabled until validation is complete
- Quickly disabling features in production if unexpected behavior occurs
This means they always know who sees a feature and when. New functionality starts with a small audience, gets validated, and then expands. If a feature requires adjustment after release, it can be disabled immediately without redeploying.
The combination of feature flags, gradual rollouts, and environment-level targeting turns release management into a predictable and low-risk process.
Why They Picked the Cat
Choosing the Right Feature Flag Service
Frontline evaluated several enterprise feature flag management solutions before selecting ConfigCat.
Ultimately, ConfigCat stood out for its balance. It provided the feature management capabilities needed to support a complex, enterprise-scale system, while still being straightforward to implement and easy for teams to adopt.
For an organization with hundreds of engineers working across multiple systems, that combination matters. The tooling needs to be powerful enough to handle real-world complexity, but simple enough that teams actually use it consistently.
“ConfigCat provided the feature management capabilities we required while remaining easy to implement, operate, and scale across teams.”
That balance between power and simplicity made ConfigCat a practical and scalable choice for their release strategy.
From Meow to Wow
Scaling Safely While Moving Faster
Frontline Education continues to evolve its platform, focusing on modernization, integration, and scalability.
With feature flags as part of their release strategy, they can move faster without sacrificing stability. Releases are now more controlled, predictable, and scalable, allowing teams to introduce new functionality with greater confidence. This is especially important in mission-critical environments like education, where reliability directly impacts real users every day.
“Today, Frontline manages more than 850 feature flags across 2 products and multiple engineering teams, enabling controlled rollouts and faster validation of new functionality before broader release.”
Is ConfigCat a Fit for You?
Take Control of Your Releases
Frontline Education's story shows how feature flags can transform the way teams release software. By decoupling deployment from release and introducing controlled rollouts, teams can reduce production risk, improve reliability, and scale more confidently.
If you are working with complex systems, multiple teams, or mission-critical applications, feature flags give you the control you need to move fast without breaking things.
Want more? Discover our other success stories!