GitLab Release Stage, 18 Sep 2020

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From YouTube: Feature Flags to Core

Description

A short demo on feature flags

https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/212318

A

Hi, my name is eureka lewinsky and I'm the senior product manager for the progressive delivery group. Here at um today. I want to talk about something really excited that we're going to be delivering in this milestone, which is offering our feature flags capability to open source, so expanding the audience is going to get the feature flag functionality.

A

So this is the issue that we are delivering a few months ago. We could we said that we were going to move a bunch of features into core so into the open source offering and future flags is one of them, and I'm really excited that we were able to do this.

A

um So the issue that you can follow is two one, two, three one eight, but what I wanna show you in this short video is actually which capabilities uh you can now use for future flags, so feature flags are found on the under the project level under operations feature flags, and when you open this uh page you'll see a list of feature flags.

A

If you have not yet created future flights, this is going to be an empty list, but we're going to go ahead and populate them with feature flags, so I just want to show you some of the capabilities and how to work with uh future flex. So, let's go ahead and create a new file.

A

When you get open a new flag, you can uh start entering different details and metadata about the flag. So let's just call this flag a and we'll give it a short description. uh This is for future a and now we can go ahead and get into the interesting things which is defining the strategy of the flag itself.

A

So strategies actually are a definition of how your audience is going to get this feature flag and who is going to get this specific feature enabled for them. So, as you can see, it says uh enable features for specific users and environments by configuring feature flag strategies. So what I want to show you today is that we can actually create multiple strategies for one for a single flag where you can really make granular decisions based on what kind of users you want to enable this feature for and which environment.

A

So it's really really um really really convenient. So, let's go ahead. The first strategy that we have is called all users. That means that, basically, the feature is going to be totally on, which will be off for the entire uh for all the users for all the audience.

A

The next one is percent users, so we can decide that the future is going to be enabled, let's say for 50 of the users, and this is going to be on production. So I only want fifty percent of the users uh to actually be exposed to this feature. The other fifty percent are gonna, get it off um and I wanna create additional strategies. So I just press the add strategy button and now I want to create a strategy based on user ids, so user's ids is actually user id in your specific application separated by commas.

A

So I'm just going to make up some user ids here and create that for our dev environment, and I want to create another strategy that is based on user list. um I have a predefined list here called my user list, but basically uh user lists is a convenient way to manage user ids. You can create a list that will hold.

A

Several lists of user ids save it for for use later on or for multiple times, it's very, very convenient and I'm going to go ahead and create this feature flag and we're back to our list, and you can see here that now we have this new flag that we created um it's currently on. You can toggle this on or off, and you can see the environment specs, so you can see that for production, it's enabled for 50 of the users for dev for dev environment. We enabled this for three users.

A

If you remember 11, 22 and 33, they were comma separated and for all environments. I enabled my user list now, I'm not very happy with this all environments, because I wanted to select a specific environment. So I can edit my flag- and I can select here for test, for example, okay, so I'm going to save my changes and when you go back to the list, you can see that now the user list strategy is enabled for testing environment.

A

Okay. So you can see that directly from this list you can toggle flags on and off you can edit them. You can delete them um and- and you can view everything that's enabled under the list tab. You can see uh my predefined, my user list list. You can create here additional lists and etc.

A

uh So I'm really excited that more people are going to be able to use this feature. I'm really looking forward to any feedback that you have on it and I want to wish you happy flag.