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Cloudflare Flagship

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Re: Cloudflare Flagship

#181

Post by epolanski »

tedk-42 wrote: post #177
epolanski wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no web request per service invocation. Feature flags are set once at startup (or specific events like hard refresh, or new login) and then simply included in the request headers. It's not rocket science, but I'm sure people are free to overcomplicate it.

That's not a feature flagging service then (config as a service! not a thing really...) I've done both client and server side implementations of the launch darkly sdk and that's how it's done to know client context. If you're initialising the entire SDK only to load 1 set of configuration items, I'd argue you can host the config as a json file on a CDN and be done with it - feature flagging is overkill.

Then I'm lost at what the difference would be and why do you need a dedicated service.

Pardon my ignorance.

Re: Cloudflare Flagship

#183

Post by cornholio »

btown wrote: post #34

Never underestimate the power of a zero-network-hop abstraction over f(feature_name, context). And context can be extremely tailored to your niche: specific inventory, from a specific supplier, for a specific user of a specific B2B client of a specific business model subtype, who should or shouldn’t see certain features on that specific inventory at certain times. When you can write your own logic, and just run this…

But why would you wrap some proprietary solution around your neck instead of rolling your own custom solution or extending some open source?

The answer for most things pertaining to encloudification seems to be "because it's easy and we are already using cloud provider X". Death by a thousand clickops.

Re: Cloudflare Flagship

#185

Post by Dylan16807 »

IanCal wrote: post #153
pavo-etc wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 con…

> This gives you a distribution unrelated to active use

Is that a problem?

> 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.

Are you trying to do a bunch of separate staged rollouts at the same time?

> 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.

They said it gets you 80% of the way there, and that seems fitting with the replies they got.

Re: Cloudflare Flagship

#186

Post by IanCal »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #185
IanCal wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 con…

> This gives you a distribution unrelated to active use Is that a problem? > 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. Are you trying to do a bunch of separate staged rollouts at the same time? > 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…

> Is that a problem?

Yes! Are you totally missing some countries, did you set it to try and hit 20% but it’s actually 60% of traffic, does it happen to include some VIP type users, how does it impact the thing you’re trying to measure while you do this?

Do you give qa user ids in the right ranges to get applied and non applied views?

Even then you’re not able to get specific combinations.

> Are you trying to do a bunch of separate staged rollouts at the same time?

That would be very common yes, otherwise a staged rollout can be a big blocker.

But more than that it means there’s one user who always gets the beta testing of everything for example.

I think it’s a lot below 80%, really.

Re: Cloudflare Flagship

#187

Post by roerohan »

Hamuko wrote: post #61
roerohan wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://blog.cloudflare.com/flagship Here's why we built it!

> Agentic coding tools like OpenCode and Claude Code are shipping entire features in minutes. How many minutes do I need to wait until app-scoped tokens are live?

We'll try to make the wait worth it

Re: Cloudflare Flagship

#188

Post by tedk-42 »

epolanski wrote: post #181
tedk-42 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not a feature flagging service then (config as a service! not a thing really...) I've done both client and server side implementations of the launch darkly sdk and that's how it's done to know client context. If you're initialising the entire SDK only to load 1 set of configuration items, I'd argue you can host the config as a json file on a CDN and be done with it - feature flagging is overkill.

Then I'm lost at what the difference would be and why do you need a dedicated service. Pardon my ignorance.

All good - it is something that has been over-complicated for marketing/product reasons.

If you know what A/B testing is, feature flagging can really allow you to nail down how you should deliver an experience to an end user.

We track end-to-end engagements on our websites based on how the content is displayed on a page with more performant layouts/content winning the test to drive users through the funnel.

I don't love it though because it's a lot of waste that gets left over and not cleaned up leaving billing to grow exponentially as flags are continually called for no reason.

Re: Cloudflare Flagship

#189

Post by julik »

bobthepanda wrote: post #163
julik wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is not hard to do (it is a modulo over a mersenne twister or something similar), but in my recent gigs just Flipper with optional "state of the flags table as of now" endpoint was more than enough. That modulo+random combo required tools like LaunchDarkly to ship SDKs in several languages, and the ones I had to work with were just plain horrible fit for their language of choice. But because the evaluation was r…

which Flipper is this?

https://github.com/flippercloud/flipper
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