Floodgates cloud-based feature management platform is being used by development, product and operations teams to help them reduce the risks inherent in code deployments while also increasing their agility and delivery velocity. Using feature flags they are able to deliver new features continuously, execute experiments in production and get real-time feedback, manage application performance and react to incidents when they occur.
Development teams use feature flags to easily decouple their code deployments from feature releases. The development team is free to deploy their code as and when they choose while the product team is able to decide when the new feature will be available to the customers.
Decoupling teams in this way leads to a much smoother deployment and release process.
Continuous integration and continuous delivery, also known as CI/CD, is a set of processes which you implement in your development pipeline. The aim of CI/CD is to increase automation allowing for in more frequent deployments.
Without the aid of feature flags it’s not possible to implement a true CI/CD pipeline for your software development. This is because you need an easy way to enable and disable the features that your team is working on even when the same code is being deployed.
Using feature flags allows for a development practice known as trunk based development.
Canary releases, also known as percentage rollouts, allow you to release your software features to your customers gradually.
Using feature flags to perform canary releases greatly reduces your deployment risks. Canary releasing gives you the opportunity to identify issues which only affect a small percentage of your user base rather than all users as with a traditional “big bang” deployment.
Testing your ideas in a production environment with real users and in real-world situations will always provide much more accurate feedback.
Using both boolean and multivariate feature flags Floodgate gives you the power to quickly and easily perform tests in your production environment.
With Floodgates multivariate feature flags you have the ability to test multiple feature variations with a single flag.
Floodgates feature flags come with powerful user targeting ability allowing you to turn a feature on or off based on individual users.
You can target users based on any number of custom attributes, like their email address or locations for example – showing certain features to all users with an @gmail.com email address or from the UK.
User targeting takes place within the Floodgate SDKs, no data about your users is sent back to the Floodgate servers, all your data stays with you!
Add feature flags to parts of your application which are not business critical or can create heavy work loads when facing high traffic volumes.
Let your Operations team turn off non-essential application functions to help manage your infrastructure when it’s under stress, in real-time, without any code deployments!
