[jonathannorris]

Really interesting take on your experience with experimentation / feature flags and wanting it to be more stateful in code. I assume that follows the more Terraform-like infrastructure as code approach, which certainly makes sense to rollout infrastructure changes. We have a V1 of a Terraform provider where we hope to enable more control through terraform to manage infrastructure changes directly, but you are correct that has yet to be our core focus. Another way we hope to expose that state outside of our UI is building out a great CLI, which we are actively working on.

Our primary usecase has been working with product development teams who have adopted Feature Flags as part of their workflows, using DevCycle to help them deploy features faster / safer to their end users, even deploying continuously as we do. Generally, customers integrate DevCycle into their Websites / Mobile Apps + API servers to control those feature deployments. We have had a couple of customers use us at the infrastructure layer. One of the best use cases I've seen is in a proxy service controlling the rollout of a new infrastructure stack. I'd love to dig into this use-case deeper and see how we can better support it in the future, "Ops" flags are one of the flag types we are looking to support.

I would say that for customers looking to disconnect the deployment of code from the release of features, our approach where you can "release" features at any time has many advantages over "git-ops" style configurations. But certainly, for Ops use-cases where you are controlling infrastructure changes, we are believers in "git-ops" and use it ourselves. The challenge comes with how to connect those two deployment styles effectively.

[danpalmer]

Thanks for the detailed reply, although I feel like I may have miscommunicated the aim here. I'm not really thinking about what is being launched, but how, and where the truth lives.

A CLI is certainly a nice feature, but brings decisions that need to be made: who runs it, where do they run it, when, how do you know what was run, how do you deploy the CLI, and so on. The same can be said for, say, running your test suite – and the solution there is to have CI do it for you. Sure you can run, but the run that matters is the one when you merge your branch and that's done in a controlled environment typically defined in code.

Rolling out features/flags is the same, and I think if the state of all the flags, features, traffic allocations, targeting, and so on, is all defined in code, then all those questions you get with a CLI go away. Who runs it? An automated process. Where do they run it? In a controlled environment, not on a dev machine. How do you know what was run? It's all there in code. How do you deploy the CLI? You don't need to.

> for customers looking to disconnect the deployment of code from the release of features, our approach where you can "release" features at any time has many advantages over "git-ops" style configurations

I'm interested as to why you say this has many advantages, because I don't see why a git based workflow couldn't run this. You could for example have DevCycle subscribe to the notifications for the git repo and update its internal state any time new changes are made to the git repo. That would be preferable over a UI or CLI because the whole state is there in a machine readable format ready for tooling to use.

[jonathannorris]

You can use a git-based workflow for feature flags, that's likely how most teams will start using flags in their code with environment variables and infrastructure state. However, most deployment pipelines in the wild are very slow and owned by engineering, limiting the value of doing git-based state for your Feature Flags.

I've seen that disconnecting the deployment of code from releasing of features can be transformative in various ways that fit better with an API-based model for Feature Flags:

- Many flags / remote config changes in production environments are made by non-developer members of a team.

- Coordinating releases across multiple platforms that have different deployment cycles. For example, deploying a new feature to Mobile + Web + APIs simultaneously.

- Enabling / disabling flags in real-time across your stack to respond to incidents.

- Support / Sales teams using Flags to gate features for customers.

- Remote config to populate data for UIs, to act as a CDN for content.

- Rolling out infrastructure changes, being able to roll back changes instantly without another deployment.

(And for context: our Feature Flag decisioning is done locally for our local bucketing server SDKs)

[jdwyah]

Prefab has something that you could use in more or less this way. The value of the flag can come from different sources and there is a defined order precedence. The base levels are default yaml files, which would be committed in your project. We think of live values from the server as a "potential override". So if you only wanted things in git you could just not use the UI. Details in https://docs.prefab.cloud/docs/explanations/bootstrapping

I'm spike-ing on some similar/adjacent things right now actually if you want to jam. I won't claim that what exists today is very polished for your usage pattern.