Company
Date Published
Author
Michael Beemer, Stefan Greifeneder
Word count
912
Language
American English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

Dynatrace, along with a consortium including GitLab, LaunchDarkly, and Split, has proposed OpenFeature, a new open standard for feature flagging, to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) as a sandbox project. This initiative aims to create a vendor-neutral and flexible framework for feature flag management, which is crucial for modern software delivery in cloud-native environments. Feature flags allow product and SRE teams to modify application functionality at runtime without deploying new code, aiding in quick issue mitigation and facilitating A/B testing. OpenFeature seeks to overcome the challenges posed by proprietary SDKs by providing a language-agnostic standard that includes specification-compliant SDKs in various languages such as Java, Node, Golang, and .NET. The architecture introduces providers, evaluation contexts, and hooks to enhance flexibility, allowing integration with existing feature flag management systems or custom-built solutions. Dynatrace's involvement will ensure the integration of OpenFeature into its platform, promoting intelligent automation of feature flagging at scale. The project is under development, with its specification nearing an alpha release, and aims for general availability by Fall 2022.