HACKER Q&A
📣 waydi

Open-Source, Self-Hosted Feature Flag System Recommendations?


I'm looking for an open-source feature flag system for a company with around 500-1000 employees.

Here are the key requirements:

Self-hosted: We need the ability to host the system on our own infrastructure.

Role-based access control: Granular permissions are important, so different team members can be restricted in terms of what they can view and manage.

Region-based flag management: The ability to manage flags by region is essential.

OpenFeature support: The system must support OpenFeature.

If anyone has experience with a feature flag system that fits these criteria, I’d love to hear your suggestions! Any insights into the pros and cons of the systems you’ve used would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance!


  👤 illuminant Accepted Answer ✓
Very interesting. In the decades I have developed such solutions, I've never heard it referred to as "feature flag." I have always called it "configuration over code".

Tbh, the habit for so long now I wonder why config over code isn't the naturally intuitive style.

Do you not initialize variables first, with passed config options? Do you not first overload these from the config chain? Isn't a simple config object which preloads the config stack for seamless dict access (fs,db,cache;global,domain,user,session) the first thing you write? You do write your own wrapper for config and dstore don't you? (Speaking to the air)

You don't need a product for everything, if you just do it right the first time ...


👤 the_mitsuhiko
> OpenFeature support: The system must support OpenFeature.

Why is that important? I generally don't understand what open feature is trying to accomplish or why it's useful. You can write your own shim to avoid lock-in if you really have to.

Out of the options available, unleash seems the most reasonable that is open source but it does not support open feature and if I were to guess, it won't.


👤 navjack27
500 to 1,000 employees is quite a lot. Does this company actually already exist or is this an idea in someone's head that this company will balloon to that many employees and you think you need these things now to hit the ground running?

The only reason I ask and say these things is because with that many people why the hell are you asking us? Maybe you should be asking on your slack or Microsoft teams or whatever the heck you use for communication, I don't know groupwise or something?