in the era of fast development, shipping updates become a dangerous activity, as historically, the engineering team had to deploy all new changes in one big deployment and hoped that no bug would ruin the whole platform.
In case something failed, a rollback became the only solution, which made it very stressful. Cloud-native organizations try to avoid such problems and use the technique of decoupling their technical and public deployment using feature flags saas.
For starters, let’s discuss the basic mechanism of decoupling release based on the feature flag, which is also known as a feature toggle. A feature flag saas, in turn, is a remote-controlled “if/else” switch coded into your software.
Once developers ship the code to the production environment, the new features will be coded in such a way that they remain turned off. However, the code will be physically deployed in production but will remain invisible to users until the product manager switches it on the dashboard.
Deployment of these digital switches fundamentally changes the entire saas deployment strategy of an organization. Instead of rolling out huge changes all at once, companies can carry out controlled multi-staged roll-outs:
Also Read: What is SaaS Product-Led Growth (PLG)? Strategy Explained
Developers can safely combine and deploy code that is still under development to production continuously without impacting the user interface.
Organizations can launch a new tool for a small group of customers, say 1% of their traffic, or select internal beta testers, in order to check its performance and collect feedback.
In case the latest release management starts behaving abnormally and impacts the performance of the application, the switch can be turned off right away.
Though short-term toggles prove amazing in terms of risk reduction, their lifespan management has to be done correctly.
These are the type of temporary toggles used to transition consumers to the new version of a service gradually. The old code, along with the toggle, has to be cleaned out when the feature gets adopted by 100% of users.
This type of toggle will be deliberately kept in the codebase as a permanent switch, for instance, for hiding premium features behind certain subscription plans.
In the end, software delivery of our times is not about sending high-risk big-bang updates anymore. Using the feature toggling saas platform gives engineering, product, and marketing teams perfect control over the process.
