Feature flags and feature flag management
What is Feature flag?
A feature flag or feature toggle is a snippet of code that serves to activate or deactivate a feature in a given code base. This can be done in a number of ways, from low-tech methods such as configuration files to high-tech methods such as a comprehensive feature flag management system to manage every toggle configuration with one UI. See more about Feature Toggles
What is Feature management?
Feature/feature flag management is the ability to show/hide a feature on demand. Simply put, feature flags are like having a switch to control features which should either be shown or hidden to the user based on the flag value
A feature flag is also called a feature switch, feature toggle, feature gate, feature flipper, or conditional flipper.
Why do we need feature flags?
Assume that we have a brand new feature release for our product. But, the users are not aware of the feature and we’d want to show the feature somewhere on the product homepage and test them internally on production as well.
One way we could achieve this is to create a new sandbox environment and replicate the production data to the sandbox environment and test it.
That works! Now, let’s say we have a defect in the feature in production and it broke the whole thing. We’d have to redeploy the last best working version onto production.
What if I say that we can do it in real-time with just a flip of a flag? Yes, it’s feature flags that get the job done.
With feature flags, we can continuously develop the features and merge them to the main branch and deploy it to production. And in real-time we can show them or hide them based on the need.
These feature flags are more useful for product owners and testers who will test features in all environments.
In this post I am going to Explorer Feature flag, Feature flag management and add feature flags in ASP.NET Core in the following links:
Feature Management In ASP.NET Core
Using feature flags in ASP.NET Core app