Evolving Global Flag Delivery - Flag Delivery at Edge
The surface level complexity of feature flagging seems easy to solve. We install some code that talks back to LaunchDarkly, flip a switch, and our application “receives” that change and acts on it. It’s easy to write this off as a basic problem to solve however at the end of the day, if features aren’t being successfully delivered within your application and to your users, with high performance and perfect consistency, what sort of confidence can we have in it working at all?
How do we guarantee when your app first starts up that it receives all the correct values? In the event the connection is lost for some reason, how do we ensure they persist? How do we ensure that a user leveraging a mobile device in a remote part of Asia gets the same experience as a laptop in San Francisco? What about when it’s a million different devices? My point is, the underlying architecture that guarantees delivery resilience, scale, and performance is just as important as the delivery of the flag itself.
To that point, we talk A LOT about the strengths of our architecture at LaunchDarkly. We mention statistics like serving “20 trillion flags a day” or “deliver updates in 200ms” as proof points that support our architecture decisions. Being on the inside, I’m fortunate to have the opportunity to learn about all the pieces (one might even call them “features”) that make all of that possible, and the way those components are continuing to evolve - and share those learnings here.
