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Comment by Traubenfuchs | Hacker News Reader

Can this do anything spring cloud config can‘t do?

This is my question. If your flags are in your repo, what is functionally the difference from just having them be variables in your code somewhere.

"Feature Flags that live inside your code" - That's just variables, no?

Feature flag state is still served dynamically through Flipt. Your code doesn’t have to redeploy for the changes to “become live”. That’s the main benefit.

Means you can experiment and target different cohorts with variants of your app without restarting processes everywhere.

Thank you. I guess I was imagining that the flags lived in your source code repo, and required a commit and push to update, thus triggering some CD build and redeploying your app anyways.

You're not wrong there at all. That is a very reasonable assumption and I think the default behaviour with most early CD pipelines. Every commit leads to a deploy event.

However, this can be changed, so that not all commits/pushes are treated equally during CD. Either by using rules to ignore changes to certain sub-directories / files or through having reproducible builds and skipping the process restarting parts when the resulting artefacts between two commits haven't changed (e.g. the digest of a docker image not changing from one commit to the next).

This is often an optimisation though, and takes time/effort to put in place.

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