Had a friend ask me for some videos around Feature Flags. There’s no shame in admitting that I’m a huge fan of feature flags; it seems like one of those no-brainers when it comes to making releases faster and safer. Without them, I’m not sure how close we can possibly get to true “continuous delivery” even for smaller sized projects.
As I think some of you might be interested as well – here’s some videos and web references below. I hope to expand on this with some more in-depth demos down the road. This is going to come across like I’m shilling for LaunchDarkly. (In all fairness, I’m not the only person at MSFT that loves them.) But when it comes to FF I’m not sure if there’s another vendor in that space that offers what they do.
- How the VSTS team uses LaunchDarkly for their performance tests (12/15/2017). (And why is this a good idea? Check out this postmortem by Brian Harry from 2013)
- The decisionmaking behind the Azure DevOps team choosing LaunchDarkly and some recommendations for vetting vendors/making data driven decisions around FF (and a related article on using release rings – Users, Early Adopters, Canaries.)
- Flags versus branching. FF definitely help make trunk-based development much more practicable for developers.
- A good overview of the positives around FF and how they’ve helped the VSTS team gate releases.
- Buck Hodges on using FF to encourage experiments. A GREAT whitepaper. The 17 minute video is good as well. And another video from Ben Waskow is here.
- A good lab for engineers to walk thru “Hello World’ style.
And some more references from my book:
- [harris] – “Using feature flags in your app release management strategy”, Richard Harris. App Developer Magazine, 4/19/2018.
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