Posted On: Nov 18, 2021
Today, we are announcing the launch of AWS AppConfig Feature Flags, which will enable you to move faster and safer while releasing new features to your customers. Feature flags allow you to release features to your applications, independent of code deployments. Development teams often coordinate application feature releases along with a large-scale marketing event and are required to release features gradually to the users. Similarly, DevOps teams often respond to operational events by enabling existing functionality in their application. This launch enables Developers and DevOps teams to use AWS AppConfig to create and validate feature flag configuration data and deploy single or multiple features flags to their application in a monitored and controlled way. AWS AppConfig, a feature of AWS Systems Manager, is used as a best practice by thousands of teams within Amazon to deploy feature flags and application configuration changes to applications at run-time.
With AppConfig Feature Flags, you can either deploy a single flag at a time or centrally manage and deploy multiple flags together to your application. You can not only set a boolean value for a flag, but can also define flag attributes values to store granular configuration values within the flag rather than embedding them into the application code. AppConfig feature flags also enable you to define constraints to validate your flag attributes values to make sure they are free of any errors. This validation helps ensure that any unexpected values are not deployed to your application, therefore mitigating risk of application outages. Once the flag data is validated, you can either roll out the flag instantly or gradually to your application. You can also use Amazon CloudWatch to set up monitors to watch for errors during deployments and AWS AppConfig can be configured to roll back the deployment if any errors are detected.
This feature is available at no extra charge. Customers only pay for AWS AppConfig usage and the resources they use.
This feature is available in all AWS regions where AWS Systems Manager is offered. To learn more, see our documentation.