ALM / DevOps

VST08 Get Good at DevOps: Feature Flag Deployments with ASP.NET, WebAPI, & JavaScript

12/06/2016

11:00am - 12:15pm

Level: Intermediate to Advanced

Benjamin Day

Consultant & Trainer

Benjamin Day Consulting, Inc.

Want to get good at DevOps but deployments are getting you down? Is code integration just plain driving you crazy? Well, maybe it's time to try out feature flags (aka. "feature toggles"). Feature flags are how sites like Visual Studio Team Services, Bing, Google, and Facebook do their deployments. And quite frankly, it makes their lives a lot easier than yours.

The idea is simple. Write a feature (or version of a feature) so you can turn it on/off using a configuration setting. That one little design decision simplifies your deployments and lets you do a whole lot of different things like private betas, A/B testing, and feature rollbacks. Best of all, you'll have a whole lot less stress because you simply stop worrying so much about how you integrate your code.

That's great. So how do you do this with ASP.NET, WebAPI, and JavaScript? Well, it's not always easy. In this session, you'll learn why you should care about Feature Flags, what they let you do, how they'll help your Scrum teams, and how to actually implement them in your applications.

You will learn:

  • What is a feature flag?
  • What is A/B testing?
  • How to implement side-by-side versioned feature deployments using feature flags in ASP MVC, WebAPI, & JavaScript