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by jiggawatts 1040 days ago
This is pretty common at larger scales, and is also often done on a per-tenant or per-account basis.

For example, the Microsoft Azure public cloud has a hierarchy of tenant -> subscription -> resource group -> resource.

It's possible to have feature flags at all four levels, but the most common one I see is rolling deployments where they pick customer subscriptions at random, and deploy to those in batches.

This means you can have a scenario where your tenant (company) is only partially enabled for a feature, with some departments having subscriptions with the feature on, but others don't have it yet.

This can be both good and bad. The blast radius of a bad update is minimised, but the users affected don't care how many other users aren't affected! Similarly, inconsistencies like the one above are frustrating. Even simple things like demonstrating a feature for someone else can result in accidental gaslighting where you swear up and down that they just need to "click here" and they can't find the button...

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The training aspect of feature flags is a huge pain point.

Not to mention it looks really awkward when an account manager has forgotten to enable some great new feature for you.