Unleash has been building its open-source feature flag server for 11 years
We've built an open-source feature flag server for 11 years
Unleash is the most popular open-source feature management platform on GitHub, letting teams deploy code in smaller releases and toggle features without redeploying. It ships 15 official client and server SDKs plus over 15 community ones, supports canary releases, kill switches, and A/B testing, and is API-first so everything can be automated. Self-host it via Docker or run it as a pure Node.js app, with Unleash Edge scaling frontend clients independently.
Feature flags in Unleash let you test your code with real production data, reducing the risk of negatively impacting your users' experience.
- sgt
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
- 0x70dd
Yesterday I saw that LaunchDarkly is a $3B company. How crazy is that?!
- sureglymop
Cool product!
This seem to be open source and self hostable (is it AGPL licensed?).
Can I, for personal use, fully self host every component? Or is it open core and e.g. multi tenancy isn't there etc.
- jonhohle
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.
- hmokiguess
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"