Hacker News Reader

I like this design choice!! Wondering, what will be the biggest drawback pop in your head compared to traditional DB config or feature flags solution?

View on HN

Complexity of initial implementation was certainly one, as we developed it. It’s not the most well trodden path for this kind of problem (well trodden for other kinds of apps). Obviously it lacks things like relations and schema, that we have to build on top of data in flat files.

One thing is that running Flipt open source on your infra, means running replicas all sourcing from the same Git repo. They currently polls for updates and this means eventual consistency comes into play when you scale. We have plans to help mitigate that with cloud though (pushing updates from cloud to your self hosted runners).

You can get around most of the consistency problem by "scheduling" the change. So, if I know it is going to take 2 minutes to make the flag available to my entire infra, I can schedule it for 5 minutes from now (could even make this configurable—a "default feature delay") which moves the consistency problem to infrastructure clock-sync.

Thats a great idea! I hadn't thought of combining it with a schedule for when a change is readable.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com