Dok Talks #146 - OpenFeature - Making feature flags a commodity // Oleg Nenashev

https://go.dok.community/slack
https://dok.community/

With:
Oleg Nenashev - Community Builder and Developer Advocate, Dynatrace
Bart Farrell - Head of Community, Data on Kubernetes Community

ABSTRACT OF THE TALK

With the evolution of software delivery methods, feature flags became one of the ways to deliver features and get user feedback. Modern applications may have hundreds of feature flags describing customizations, preview features and environment specifics. Feature flags are not just a single toggle anymore, their values are often determined at runtime depending on the instance, user context and inputs from the control plane.

In this session we will talk about OpenFeature - a new collaboration by many feature flag vendors and end users. OpenFeature, a CNCF sandbox project, is an open standard for feature flag management, created to support a robust feature flag ecosystem using cloud native technologies and to basically make feature flags a commodity. OpenFeature provides a unified API and SDKs, and a developer-first, cloud-native implementation, with extensibility for open source and commercial offerings.

BIO

Oleg works on open source programs and Keptn community at the Dynatrace Open Source Program Office. He is a TOC chair and community ambassador in the Continuous Delivery Foundation. Oleg is a core maintainer and board member in Jenkins where he writes code, mentors contributors, and organizes community events and Google Summer of Code in the project. Open source software and open hardware advocate. Oleg has a PhD degree in hardware design and volunteers in the Free and Open Source Silicon Foundation.

KEY TAKE-AWAYS FROM THE TALK

Feature flags at scale 101. Feature flags are an important topic for stateful apps in K8s, and for progressive delivery and other modern approaches. OpenFeature is like OTel but for feature flags. You can try it now, here is a live demo to follow.