Pull off your headphones, put down the RedBull, and listen up, because we have some news for you!
CloudBees Feature Management Community Edition gives you access to enterprise-grade feature flag management capabilities at no cost.
It’s no secret that releasing software using feature flags has grown in popularity immensely in recent years. Developers love feature flags because they enable trunk-based development and decouple deployment from release, removing a multitude of headaches that typically arise in the feature release process. Product managers and business leaders love them because they allow them to get more features out faster, and better align them with user feedback.
So if feature flags are so great, why hasn’t every company adopted them at scale? At this point, I’ve talked to more development teams about feature flag adoption than I can count, and the reluctance typically falls into two categories: governance concerns and headaches around using feature flags at scale.
Governance concerns from highly regulated companies can be quite valid. Many companies have outdated policies around releasing “incomplete” code into production without thorough testing that conflict with more modern “progressive delivery” principles. Feature flags give the developers the ability to change the behavior of an application in run-time without redeploying, and this potential raises concerns for some CIOs who worry about what could be done either by accident or intentionally to code in production without proper oversight.
Enterprise feature flag management platforms aim to provide the level of accessibility, visibility, auditability, and approval required to ensure flag changes are governed correctly. And in the course of just a few years, I’ve seen some of our most regulated customers move from “there is no way we’d ever be able to use feature flags,” to “well, maybe someday we’d be interested if we could control it with ‘xyz’ approvals,” to “hey, we’d really like to see a demo of what you can do.” Times are changing - quickly.
And problems with feature flags do arise at scale. I’ve heard the phrase thrown around, “everyone loves feature flags until they have more than 10.” And for good reason. Feature flags do create technical debt within your code, complicate testing, and can create headaches when used at scale, particularly when they are dependent on one another for different functionality. But again, these are known issues and enterprise feature flag management tools – like ours – are constantly looking to ensure that the positives of feature flags can be achieved while these drawbacks are mitigated.
Which brings me back to CloudBees Feature Management Community Edition.
We are on a mission to get as many development teams around the world delivering progressively using feature flags as quickly as possible, without limitations in functionality due to cost. So, we made the decision to provide our full-featured feature flag management platform completely free for development teams of up to 15 users. For any company on the fence about using feature flags, or for teams managing flags with a “homegrown” system that doesn’t scale, CloudBees Feature Management Community Edition provides all of the functionality required to mitigate any of the governance or flag scaling concerns that I’ve outlined.
Why is this news? Because no one else is doing it. Sure, there are a few open source tools out there with limited functionality. And sure, some of our more enterprise-focused friends in the space have limited functionality and limited-user free tiers as well. But you will not find a more feature-packed feature flag management platform today being offered for free than what we’re offering with Feature Management Community Edition.
Feature flag management tools are designed to be used by entire teams, so it makes sense to allow entire teams to use it together for free. And ours includes all the main bells and whistles that our enterprise users enjoy, such as flag scheduling, approval flows, relay proxy, audit logs, webhooks, flag lifecycling, and all the integrations you could want, including with Slack and Jenkins. Plus, you receive access to features our users especially love, like bi-directional configuration as code to allow developers to update flags straight from their repositories.
The future of software delivery is progressive delivery. And we want to get you there as quickly as possible. CloudBees Feature Management Community Edition is a great first step for teams who want to modernize their software delivery efforts today.
Deliver more features faster, with a backbone of flag governance and scalable flag management. Get started with CloudBees Feature Management Community Edition today!