I'm out of my league on this discussion, but it reminds me of the Configuration Database (CDB) used for most modern aircraft.
Cloudflare Flagship
151–160 of 189 posts
Re: Cloudflare Flagship
#152I've never understood feature flags. How are they fundamentally different to a Boolean in a database?
The flags (whether they be booleans, strings, numbers, or anything else) are the trivial part. It's the targeting and rollout rules (i.e. who gets to see which flags), and the requirements for extremely fast and consistent evaluation of these rules, that can get surprisingly complicated fast, and folks who have rolled their own usually find that product management or marketing or sales wants to target using more comp…
Great reply. Thank you for taking the time
Re: Cloudflare Flagship
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
how would a single JSON allow staged rollouts with sticky sessions?
you pick a frequency you want, represent that as a fraction, and modulo on user id, and your 80% of the way there
This gives you a distribution unrelated to active use, puts users in the same bucket (with the same number you’re going to have the same users in the first 10%) and links combinations together.
Often problems are more complex than they seem at first sight and I have found it’s a good approach to think “what am I missing” rather than “lots of people must be making very obviously bad decisions” and reach the latter conclusion only after more work. Usually I’ve missed something.
Re: Cloudflare Flagship
#154I've never understood feature flags. How are they fundamentally different to a Boolean in a database?
It's the tooling around them. How do you set a boolean to only return true for queries to 5% of the fleet? And which 5% of the fleet? And then ramp up on a predefined cadence? Or how about returning true only for customers in the preview group for the feature? Does the database return false automatically if the 5% of the fleet where it's true start crashing or throwing exceptions? Does it hook into your observability…
Thanks, good reply. I can see the argument for sure.
I guess I like boring software too much to reach for a dependency but I do see how the tooling matters here.
Re: Cloudflare Flagship
#155Gold-plated booleans-as-a-service
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Re: Cloudflare Flagship
#156Fix your stupid Turnstile that blocks humans first. You are gatekeeping the whole Internet. Even Anubis works better than the Clownflare garbage.
Re: Cloudflare Flagship
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
That sounds like the product is not finished and should not be released?
"If you are not ashamed by what you are shipping, you are not shipping early enough" (Quoting from memory)
If your engineer tells you that, you're going to have a bad time.
I think you're thinking this:
> If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late. -Reid Hoffman
Re: Cloudflare Flagship
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
how would a single JSON allow staged rollouts with sticky sessions?
you pick a frequency you want, represent that as a fraction, and modulo on user id, and your 80% of the way there
This just tells me you haven’t worked on a big/complex enough system.
If it were that easy people would not be paying for it.
Re: Cloudflare Flagship
#159I am a mere mortal when it comes to understanding the technicalities, but I know i find it relatively easy to use Cloudflare and all I want to say is keep up the good work.
Re: Cloudflare Flagship
#160I really like the speed at which Cloudflare is executing toward becoming a critical infrastructure player with all of those new product offerings. That said, not everything needs to be serverless. Their Gen 13 hardware looks impressive, and it’s a pity you can’t rent it by the hour like AWS EC2 Metal instances.