What Is a Feature Flag?
Imagine you're running a restaurant and you want to test a new dish with a few customers before offering it to everyone. You wouldn't want to cook the entire dish for the whole restaurant just to see how it's received. Instead, you'd serve it to a small group first and then decide whether to make it available to all based on their feedback.
A feature flag is like that restaurant test. It allows you to turn features on for some customers and off for others — without deploying new code. This means you can experiment with new functionality, fix bugs, or even roll out features to a specific group of users before making them available to everyone.
Key Insight: Feature flags are not just for developers. They are a powerful tool for business leaders and product managers to control the pace of innovation and ensure that new features are tested and validated before being released to the entire user base.
Why Use Feature Flags?
Control the Pace of Innovation
With feature flags, you can slow down the release of new features and test them with a subset of users before making them available to everyone. This helps you identify and fix issues early and reduce the risk of a failed release.
For example, if you're launching a new payment feature, you can use a feature flag to test it with a small group of users and monitor their behavior before making it available to the entire user base.
- Test new features with a subset of users
- Monitor performance and user feedback
- Fix issues before a full release
- Reduce the risk of a failed release
Support Business Goals
Feature flags also help you support business goals by allowing you to launch features to specific customer segments based on their needs and preferences.
For instance, if you're a SaaS company and you want to launch a new feature to your enterprise customers before making it available to your small business users, you can use a feature flag to control the release and ensure that the feature is tested and validated before being made available to the entire user base.
How Does Bastionary Help With Feature Flags?
Bastionary is a self-hosted platform that provides auth, billing, licensing, and feature flags in one place. This means you can manage all your business operations from a single platform and ensure that your feature flags are integrated with your other business systems.
With Bastionary, you can create and manage feature flags directly from your dashboard. You can also set up rules to control who sees which features and when.
For example, you can use a feature flag to launch a new feature to your enterprise customers and set up rules to ensure that only those customers see the feature.
Warning: Always test