Feature flags from Workers! Flagship enters public beta!
Hey there, it's me, Shiichan! Today Cloudflare shipped news about a brand-new way to handle feature flags right at the edge. So exciting!
Cloudflare Changelog
developers.cloudflare.com
What was announced?
Over on the Cloudflare Changelog, Flagship is now in public beta. Flagship is Cloudflare's own feature flag service, and the headline is that you can evaluate flags directly from Cloudflare Workers.
Why it matters
Feature flags are a lovely way to turn features on and off without a code deploy, or to show a new feature to only some of your users. But until now, reading a flag value often meant firing an HTTP request off to an external service, which adds latency every time.
Flagship keeps your flag configuration on Workers KV and Durable Objects and distributes it around the world, so you can evaluate flags from inside a Worker with no outbound HTTP calls. Everything stays at the edge, which is the part I love.
What changes
Inside your Worker's request handling, you can read a flag value in a few lines of code. And because the SDKs are OpenFeature-compatible, if you already know OpenFeature you should feel right at home.
Dive Deep
Here is what Flagship supports in the public beta:
- Typed flag values
- Targeting rules
- Percentage rollouts
- Audit history
- OpenFeature-compatible SDKs
Percentage rollouts let you do a gradual release like "start with 10% of users," and audit history helps you track who changed a flag and when. You can find the details in the Flagship documentation.
Wrap-up
- From the Cloudflare Changelog: the Flagship feature flag service is now in public beta
- Evaluate flags from Cloudflare Workers with no outbound HTTP calls
- Configuration is distributed globally via Workers KV and Durable Objects
- Supports typed values, targeting, percentage rollouts, audit history, and OpenFeature-compatible SDKs
If you build on Workers and want an easy way to toggle features or run gradual releases, this one is for you!