CloudBees this week announced an update to CloudBees Feature Flags that now makes it possible to deploy this capability in on-premises IT environments.
Moritz Plassnig, senior vice president and general manager for software delivery management and software delivery automation cloud at CloudBees, said CloudBees Feature Flags previously was available only as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application following the company’s acquisition of Rollout last year.
However, there are still many organizations in highly regulated industries that are prohibited from developing applications in the cloud. The latest version now allows those organizations to employ CloudBees Feature Flags to roll out new features in a more controlled way, he said.
Cloud computing, of course, has been around for more than a decade. The adoption of cloud computing has increased dramatically in recent years; however, the bulk of applications are still deployed in on-premises IT environments. CloudBees makes on-premises editions of its platforms available alongside cloud services to meet IT teams wherever they are on the application development spectrum, said Plassnig.
While feature flagging has been around for some time most enterprise IT organizations are just now starting to employ it. As organizations roll out new capabilities, feature flagging enables DevOps teams to make a new capability available to only a small segment of application users. Assuming all goes well, the DevOps teams can then go ahead make that capability available to all users with greater confidence. Feature flagging makes deploying updates to applications less scary for all concerned by reducing the inherent risks, Plassnig noted.
Feature flagging is used mainly within the context of application development. However, Plassnig said eventually this capability will be deployed more widely in production environments. Organizations, for example, might employ feature flagging to make specific capabilities available to specific classes of users.
Of course, CloudBees is not the only provider of a DevOps platform to embrace feature flagging. However, as the provider of an enterprise edition of one of the most widely employed continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platforms, CloudBees is betting it’s in a better position to make feature flagging a standard capability within any software development life cycle (SDLC). Plassnig said DevOps teams should also expect to see CloudBees tighten the integration between CloudBees Feature Flags and CloudBees Flow, a tool for orchestrating releases and automating application deployments.
With the rise of microservices, it’s become easier for DevOps teams to isolate functions within applications. The challenge is that managing all those modules of code often requires DevOps teams to implement more complex workflow processes. Advances in automation will simplify those processes; nevertheless, DevOps teams still have to define the workflow processes that will be automated.
In the meantime, it’s only a matter of time before DevOps teams come to view feature flagging as a standard requirement. It will be interesting to see to what degree feature flagging might one day be incorporated into the core open source CI/CD platform itself.
