Re:“Yes, you should test on production” – Why developer expe...
by datadrivenangel on Monday August 14, 2023 @08:27AM
(#37120237)
The training aspect of feature flags is a huge pain point.
Not to mention it looks really awkward when an account manager has forgotten to enable some great new feature for you.
For example, the Microsoft Azure public cloud has a hierarchy of tenant -> subscription -> resource group -> resource.
It's possible to have feature flags at all four levels, but the most common one I see is rolling deployments where they pick customer subscriptions at random, and deploy to those in batches.
This means you can have a scenario where your tenant (company) is only partially enabled for a feature, with some departments having subscriptions with the feature on, but others don't have it yet.
This can be both good and bad. The blast radius of a bad update is minimised, but the users affected don't care how many other users aren't affected! Similarly, inconsistencies like the one above are frustrating. Even simple things like demonstrating a feature for someone else can result in accidental gaslighting where you swear up and down that they just need to "click here" and they can't find the button...