CNCF-hosted Co-located Events North America 2024

Project Calico is a widely adopted open-source solution known for its flexible architecture, providing robust networking and security across most cloud providers. Feature flagging is a critical step in every release for Project Calico, allowing Tigera engineers to deploy our solution without breaking the Internet. This talk will explore the importance of feature flagging within Project Calico, highlighted by the real-world case study of the Reddit Pi Day incident. We will discuss how this incident underscored the necessity of feature flagging and led to its extensive adoption in our project. Attendees will gain insights into the underlying problems that feature flagging solves on a big scale and the relevance of these practices in maintaining seamless, secure operations in diverse cloud environments. Join us to learn how Project Calico leverages feature flagging, which allows you to scroll through your favourite social services, such as Reddit!

In the dynamic world of software development, how do you ensure quality without compromising speed? And how OpenFeature empower QA teams to elevate their testing game? "Test Smarter, Not Harder: QA Enhancements with OpenFeature" delves into the revolutionary ways OpenFeature enhances your QA processes, allowing teams to achieve robust, bug-free releases exploring how feature flags when integrated with OpenFeature, reduce the complexity of environment management, and enable more granular control over feature deployments. Attendees will gain insights into setting up effective feature flagging strategies and leveraging OpenFeature's capabilities to minimize risk and maximize quality. Whether you're a QA engineer, developer, or project manager, this talk will equip you with the tools and knowledge to enhance your QA processes, delivering high-quality software faster and with greater confidence. Embrace the future of QA with OpenFeature and start testing smarter, not harder.

eBay, a seasoned 20+ year big-tech with ~4000 engineers adopted OpenFeature on its large scale decision making platform. This success story is more than simply a feature flag enablement, it's about simplifying a complex onboarding process, enabling flags and offering a 5-star developer experience! This 2023 highlight took two partners with complimenting skill-sets, a lot of trust and continuous iterations. We'll walk through the state of the world before the introduction of Open Feature, how we built an internal community around the mission and practical techniques that were used to establish leadership buy-in and accelerate momentum in such a large complex organization.

Running a few experiments is easy, especially when using feature flags. However, scaling up experimentation and adopting an experimentation-driven approach across an entire organization is much more challenging. How can the frequency of experiments be increased while maintaining quality and trustworthy results? This talk will address this question by exploring the methods top companies use to run their experimentation programs at massive scales. It will start with an introduction to experimentation-driven product development and discuss the advantages of these techniques. Then, the discussion will cover how experimentation programs can go wrong and, finally, how top companies structure their programs to solve these issues and unlock experimentation at a large scale.

Feature flags offer powerful control over software releases, but they introduce hidden complexities in version management and user adoption that can catch development teams off guard. As application states multiply and the definition of a "version" blurs, teams struggle with maintaining compatibility and ensuring smooth updates across diverse platforms and user segments. To address these challenges, we propose a strategy of treating feature flag rollouts as code changes, favoring smaller, more frequent updates over large-scale alterations. This talk will unveil the often-overlooked costs of feature flags, explore their impact on versioning and user experience, and provide attendees with practical strategies for mitigating these issues. By the end, you'll have a clearer understanding of how to navigate the complex landscape of feature flag implementation, balancing the benefits of flexibility with the need for manageable, user-friendly software evolution.

Gradual rollouts are an important use-case for feature flags. But not all hashing algorithms have the same goals. In this analysis, we will compare/contrast hashing algorithms and why your standard password hashing algorithm might not be ideal compared to some others. Some are also more readily available in various languages which can influence your decisions when building SDKs. We will outline which metrics we care about and why while graphing the results.