This post describes how feature flags benefit SREs, and what SREs can do to make sure their organizations take full advantage of feature flags.
Join the DZone community and get the full member experience. When you think of who uses feature flags, your mind most likely goes to developers. In general, feature flags are closely associated with software engineering. But Site Reliability Engineers (SRE), too, can benefit from feature flags. SREs may not be the ones to create feature flags, but they should work closely with developers to ensure that the applications their teams support include feature flags. Here’s why feature flags benefit SREs, and what SREs can do to make sure their organizations take full advantage of feature flags. A feature flag – also sometimes called a feature toggle – is a technique in software engineering that allows developers to turn specific features on or off at application runtime. In other words, feature flags let you control which features are available within your application when it’s deployed to production. Feature flags can be configured in such a way that they enable features to be toggled on or off for specific sets of users, rather than an entire set of end-users. This is useful if, for example, you want to turn on an experimental new feature for users who have agreed to test it, without exposing that feature to your general user base. Usually, developers and SREs use feature flags to turn features on and off manually. But you could automate the process by, for example, writing a script that automatically shuts off a feature if your observability tools determine that the feature is causing a problem for users. The main reason why feature flags are popular among developers is that feature flags make it easy to implement and experiment with new features while keeping your development pipeline simple.
