#EPHEMERAL ENVIRONMENTS HOW TO#

Ephemeral environments are automated, can be shared, and have replicated data. They can also be known as dynamic, temporary, or on-demand environments.

They can last as long as the CI/CD lifecycle, or up to a week but their unique and distinguishing factor is that they are temporary. This can pose a challenge to feature flags if you have ephemeral environments which are temporary, unlike a production and staging environment.Įphemeral environments don’t last for a long time and are removed after a short period of time. While managing your feature flags is important, you also need to ensure you have several testing environments. This includes providing a single interface to manage and maintain your flags, being able to retrieve them quickly, and dividing user traffic to more than one feature. Companies like DevCycle come in to help solve the complexities that come with dynamic feature flags. The code that toggles a feature on or off used to live alongside the feature code, with dynamic feature toggling can be done without making any changes to code since the feature flags are controlled externally.ĭynamic feature flags allow developers to use if statements rather than the original hard-coded flags. Development teams are always going to have to evaluate if a feature should be on or off. In general, the concept of feature flags relies on if statements/boolean logic. This is where dynamic feature flags come in.

#EPHEMERAL ENVIRONMENTS HOW TO#

However, feature toggling has grown to become more complex, offering you more options for how to control your feature. Originally, feature flags worked as a boolean where you would turn them on or off to reveal a feature. Being able to track the status of your new code and release it when you’re ready can help with hygiene, testing, and showing changes to individual users or stakeholders in your company. Using feature flags is a key part of having a modern software development process.