The Future of Feature Flags: Managing Dynamic Applications

Feature flags or toggles have evolved from simple on/off mechanisms to multivariate tools that enable developers to serve dynamic values such as strings, numbers, JSON objects, and arrays. This has opened up a new world of application management possibilities. Multivariate feature flags allow for customization in the number and type of variations returned. Use cases include managing features in pricing plans, personalizing user experiences, controlling CSS styling, and managing conditional logic separately from code base. Serving dynamic values can be achieved by calling a variation method to determine which variation the user should get based on their attributes. Feature flags are best used for personalized feature targeting without tying that logic into the codebase, allowing rapid changes in pricing models, testing color schemes, and configuring complex features without redeployment.