[ojkelly]

There’s 2 mains ways to do feature flags.

Coupled to a code deploy or not.

Changing flags on deploy is simple, great when you have a fast pipeline and only a few flags.

But at some point it becomes useful to decouple feature release from code deploy.

And the only way to do that, is to be able to change the value of a flag out-of-band of a pipeline.

Then you have the capability to test new code in environments before prod and in small parts of prod—canary releases and so on.

Configuration and settings management overlaps with feature flags, but note that often the value comes from the ability to test and safely deploy new code into production environments (more of a release flag), that to enable a feature for a specific user. It just so happens that the use cases and technical implementations overlap so frequently it’s sometimes less work to use the same system.