We've built an open-source feature flag server for 11 years

Had a look at their website [1]. Initial thoughts: this is a bit ridiculous, I can just build that myself. And in fact, I have done already.

Thoughts after about 3 minutes of browsing: OK, this actually makes sense and I see why people would pay for this. The value proposition is definitely there

[1] https://www.getunleash.io/

Yesterday I saw that LaunchDarkly is a $3B company. How crazy is that?!

Are most feature flag systems really just simple Boolean checks like this with no feedback loop? In 2009 Amazon’s equivalent supported multi-variate flags (run test with more than 2 options), a feedback loop for performance/attribution, and weighting. I don’t see any of that on the unleash home page, but also haven’t seen it in other feature config systems either.

This domain needs some better ontology and taxonomy, there's so many overlapping and conflated terms whenever I hear about it. To name a few:

- Feature Flags used as Configs;

- Configs used as Feature Flags;

- Live Ops, Control Groups, Experiments, Analytics, and more bundled as "extras" to Feature Flags as if they were the right parent term;

I think classical systems/engineering see feature flags as boolean state in some data store, but these PaaS are pushing it as a new thing and struggling with marketing.

I wish they took the gaming companies lesson and started using the term "Live Ops"

Cool! Feature flags are great when you need them. I’ve seen so many different implementations of flags over the years. Even made one myself couple years ago which uses a GitHub issue (and a list of checkboxes) as a persistent store for maintaining and toggling with flags. https://github.com/TimMikeladze/next-flag

OpenFeature (https://openfeature.dev/) is very similar and backed by CNCF.

Literally all their examples can be replaced by some sort of:

    if redis_client.get("staging.feature-flag"):
        ...

I guess their frontend for managing these is 'nice', but at the end of the day it's a static page that sets flags on redis.

open-source = FIRE

> Release, experiment, and kill anything AI ships

The only appealing marketing I've seen in the past three years

Configuration as a Service companies must be a having a tough time these days...

I couldnt imagine a lot of teams are debating anymore whether to build their own or use an off the shelf product like this. The former being a straight forward task for an LLM. And the latter being a point of failure/attack for any one want to mess with the core foundations of a product.

Wow a server that can help you manage your booleans. That's so useful. Let me just add one more thing to my infrastructure so my list of booleans can be managed.

“open source” but it’s the nonfree AGPL, and naturally RBAC and SSO are behind a paywall. I’m tired of fake open source projects that just want the street cred and free marketing.

Hi HN, I'm Ivar, creator of Unleash.

Unleash started in 2014 as an internal tool at my company at the time, because we wanted to ship to production continuously without big-bang releases. It's an Open-Source feature flag platform with SDKs for >25 languages.

A few design choices that might be interesting:

- Local evaluation: server-side SDKs fetch the flag config and evaluate in-process, so user data never leaves your app and a flag check is a memory lookup, not a network call.

- Shared Rust engine (Yggdrasil): the evaluation logic is written once in Rust and embedded in the SDKs, so behaviour is the same across languages.

- Unleash Edge: a Rust proxy/cache for frontend and edge clients at scale. (Commercial)

- OpenFeature: supported if you don't want to lock into our SDKs.

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