I mean... I, for my own needs, which are rather simple, can replace Dropbox with rsync. That's one thing. But yes, it's an entirely different thing to consider you don't need, or worse, could own, such business, on the simple premise you don't need it at your own level. That would be madness to mistake one for the other.
It makes sense to not want to create an admin dash, but to avoid having to keep track of thousands of feature flags in your db, it seems all you're doing here is moving them to another db
Git is typically fairly slow if you have to wait on a test suite and deployment pipeline. Usually at least 10 minutes but sometimes 30, 60, 90+ minutes. A lot of purprose-built feature flag platforms hot reload the config in seconds.
JSON in the repo also risks introducing customer data to git if you want to rollout based on specific customer attributes (sometimes, for us, it's a list of early opt-in customers we have meetings with to discuss/develop new features)
It's also less accessible for "business users" like product/project managers, sales, and marketing they want to coordinate feature rollout with other business initiatives (and don't want to bother engineers when they do)
I’ve seen whole teams at companies set up fail to provide these booleans-as-a-service well. There are whole companies like LaunchDarkly for them.
If you boil it down to this, you may as well boil down every service that exists to bits-as-a-service.
Turns out theres legitimate business value in these things, and complexity in delivering them.
It's like saying Dropbox is just rsync.
I mean... I, for my own needs, which are rather simple, can replace Dropbox with rsync. That's one thing. But yes, it's an entirely different thing to consider you don't need, or worse, could own, such business, on the simple premise you don't need it at your own level. That would be madness to mistake one for the other.
I don't mind it. I don't want to keep track of thousands of feature flags in my DB, have to create an admin dash, etc.
You could call any SaaS tool "excel-as-a-service" and it would hold the same power as your comment.
It makes sense to not want to create an admin dash, but to avoid having to keep track of thousands of feature flags in your db, it seems all you're doing here is moving them to another db
or maybe just make single JSON and commit it to git? your http server + GitHub + JSON and text editor is your admin ui, audit, etc.
Git is typically fairly slow if you have to wait on a test suite and deployment pipeline. Usually at least 10 minutes but sometimes 30, 60, 90+ minutes. A lot of purprose-built feature flag platforms hot reload the config in seconds.
JSON in the repo also risks introducing customer data to git if you want to rollout based on specific customer attributes (sometimes, for us, it's a list of early opt-in customers we have meetings with to discuss/develop new features)
It's also less accessible for "business users" like product/project managers, sales, and marketing they want to coordinate feature rollout with other business initiatives (and don't want to bother engineers when they do)
how would a single JSON allow staged rollouts with sticky sessions?
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Getting those booleans to the right place at the right time reliably isn't trivial.
MVP
yes, worth every penny
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