Choose Your Own Deployment: Interactive Feature Flag Adventure

Thursday, 11:00 AM EST

Welcome, bold adventurer! Are you ready to work with me to explore the multiple paths of deployment, activation, and feature flags? The audience drives the talk by choosing different deployment and activation options in real time and we’ll see how the story ends.

We’ll use this format to explore how feature flags can work with CI/CD or other rapid deployment models, and how we can work to make deployments safer and faster incrementally.

Audiences will get a fun, fast-paced exploration of forking deployments. They’ll walk away with an understanding of how to reduce the risk of major changes, how to follow multiple streams of deployment, and how to evaluate the best way to speed deployment in their environments.

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This really is a dynamic, audience driven presentation. They'll select branching options, and I'll create the talk on the fly based on pre-determined options. As such, it's going to be hard to show you the outline. Topics I intend to cover include feature flags, scaled deployments, and kill switches.

Tinkertoys, Microservices, and Feature Management: How to Build for the Future

Thursday, 2:30 PM EST

Lots of us aren’t developing tidy, discrete features that are easy to manage. How do you plan to move from a tangle of interconnected features to something that you can test and deploy each part of? How do you manage the combinatorial complexity of individual feature testing? Join us for an overview on the conceptual basis of designing for feature management.

It sounds simple to say that we will build one feature at a time, give it an API interface and allow it to connect with other features and microservices. The implementation is anything but simple. This talk explores how you can start migrating your existing features and services to a more modular, testable, and resilient system.

Since containers are not state-aware, how do you make changes to their presentation without needing to rebuild them entirely? With feature flags, your container can be stable and your presentation dynamic. How can you test a distributed architecture on your laptop? How can you simulate partial outages? This talk is going to touch on some of the best practices that you can use to bring new life to your brown fields.

Everything is a Little Bit Broken ~or~ The Illusion of Control

Friday, 4:00 PM EST

We never change the amount of work or technical debt, we just shift it, and with it, we change how it emerges and appears.

Our systems don’t have to be perfect to be operational - planes, networks, and elite athletes all function at extremely high levels even though they are not operating at 100%.

The audience will leave with some concrete ideas about how to add resiliency to their system by learning to trust but mitigate their reliance on perfect performance of their underlying tools.

As an industry, we have moved the locus of control from hardware to operating system to virtual machine, to container, to orchestration, and now we are approaching serverless. None of that has reduced the amount of work that must happen, it just makes it possible to re-use and conceptually compress the work of others. Since we are making the work in our tools less visible, we also have less control over how they work. We end up assuming that the promises that have been true will continue to be true, but that is not in our control.

How do we handle this level of uncertainty? By adding in error budgets, layered access, and other accommodations for failure and for designing our systems for function over form or purity.