Frequently Asked Questions

What is FeatureBoard?

FeatureBoard is a feature management platform that helps you manage your features and releases. It allows you to manage your features in a central place, and then target them to specific audiences. We strive to make it easy to use, and leave you to focus on building great products.

What is a feature flag?

A feature flag is something which has different values for different users, and can be used to control the behaviour of your application. For example, you might have a feature flag called Show advertising which is either true or false. You can then use this flag to control whether or not to show advertising to a user. Another example which has multiple values could be web hooks which developers can use to get notified about events in your application. You could have it be None for some users, Basic for others, and Advanced for the rest.

Can I target a user in FeatureBoard?

Instead of targeting users, FeatureBoard enables you to specify Audiences that a user belongs to.

This approach has a number of advantages for simplicity and scalability.

For example, using feature flags on a high traffic website, like a news website, can heavily impact your ability to cache the page. News websites have a lot of users, but only a handful of variations based on the users subscription level, country of origin etc.

Another example is a typical user targeting scenario, where you grant a user access to an early access feature. In FeatureBoard you can create an Early Access attribute on your users then pass that as an Audience to FeatureBoard.

This concept is well established in other platforms like Azure where it’s best practice to grant groups permissions, not direct to users. We have taken those lessons and applied them to feature management.

Can I do A/B testing with FeatureBoard?

Yes!

While A/B testing is not officially supported by FeatureBoard right now, this is coming soon.

If this interests you, please contact us as support@featureboard.app to be added to the preview list.

Why audience based feature management?

Many products enable you to target attributes of a user, for example their email address, or their name. This is useful, but it can be difficult to manage. You might want to just target internal users, in traditional approaches you would add a rule of email ends with @yourcompany.com.

FeatureBoard takes a step back, and allows you to plan your audiences ahead of time but keep the rules of how to calculate audiences in your application where you can unit test them and keep the rules in FeatureBoard simple.

It also means that FeatureBoard gets far less PII (Personally Identifiable Information) than other products, which is good for your users and good for you.

Finally for developers, audiences can allow you to introduce caching and other optimisations to your application.

What happens if FeatureBoard is down?

FeatureBoard is designed to be highly available, but if it does go down, new instances of your application will not start correctly. This is by design, as we don’t want your application to start up in a state where it is not working correctly.

For this reason we recommend you configure an External State Store for the FeatureBoard SDK, this allows you to cache the last known good configuration of FeatureBoard in your own database or redis instance. This means that if FeatureBoard is down, your application will still start correctly as it can use the last known good configuration.