Overview
Featureflow is a feature management tool that provides you best practice tools to enable feature management on both the server and client side of your application.
It does this using a unique combination of client and server side SDKs combined with a simple and easy to use admin site.
Key Concepts
Organisation
When you create your account you create an Organisation. The organisation is the all-encompassing owner of your featureflow account.
Project
You may create multiple projects (based on your subscription) - you typically create a project for each functional application your organisation manages.
For example, your application may consist of a few backend services in java, some serverless functions and a react frontend. All of these related application components could be managed under one project.
Environment
A project may have multiple environments. These correlate to your applications environments. In addition each developer has their own individual sandbox environment named 'local'. Each environment has its own set of environment keys for the server and client side SDKs
Features
A feature is a manageable item within your project, your feature has a project-unique key and a set of configurations for each environment to determine what variant to display to which users.
Feature Controls
A features individual environment configuration (the feature flag) is known as a feature control (or simply 'control'). Feature controls contain the rules and variants to show for a given environment.
Variants
A feature control is evaluated to one of a number of variants. The default, and simplest form of control contains two variants - 'on' and 'off' indicating whether the feature should be on or off respectively. As you develop more complex scenarios, variants can indicate a number of states such as 'red', 'blue', '1.1', '1.2', 'live', 'maintenance'. Using this simple concept can enable a number of powerful features.
User
When a control is evaluated you may pass in a user. A user has a unique id and a set of attributes that may be evaluated to determine the variant shown. User attributes may be any single or list of string, date or number and can be targeted by configuring the feature control rules in the featureflow UI
The Featureflow Architecture
Featureflow's unique feature management platform provides feature configuration in through our globally distribute highly available real-time CDN.
Our SDKs allow you to get started quickly both your server and web clients.
Server SDKs receive feature rules from featuerflow - the SDKs will cache those rules and evaluate them as required when a feature is evaluated. This means your server evaluations are instant - often faster than going to your own database. Feature rule changes (such as turning a feature on and off) are pushed directly to the SDKs in the background.
Client SDKs call featureflow directly to evaluate features. We do not want to send all feature rules to a web client, thus the javascript clients ask featureflow to evaluate a feature. This is performed through our Highly Available Global CDN.
Both clients send intermittent events to featureflow so that we can display feature usage and statuses in the dashboard.
