Unleashing Deploy Velocity with Feature Flags

A lot of development teams have built out fully automated CI/CD pipelines to deliver code to production fast! Then you quickly discover that the new bottleneck in delivering features is their existence in longlived feature branches and no true CI is actually happening. This problem compounds as you start spinning up microservices and building features across your multirepo architecture and coordinating some ultrafancy release schedule so it all deploys together. Feature flags provide you the mechanism to reclaim control of the release of your features and get back to shortlived branches with true CI. However, what you're not told about feature flags in those simple “if/else” getting started demos is that there is an upfront cost to your development time, additional complexities, and some pitfalls to be careful of as you begin expanding feature flag usage to the organization. If you know how to navigate these complexities you will start to unleash true velocity across your teams.