DevOps in the Spotlight

W12 Get Good at DevOps: Feature Flag Deployments with ASP.NET & WebAPI

10/10/2018

1:30pm - 2:45pm

Level: Advanced

Benjamin Day

Author, Trainer, Developer

Want to get good at DevOps but deployments are getting you down? Is the code integration process just plain driving you crazy? Well, maybe it's time to try out feature flags (aka. "feature toggles"). Feature flags are how sites like Visual Studio Team Services, Bing, Google, and Facebook do their deployments – and frankly, it makes their lives a lot easier than yours.

The idea is simple. Write a feature (or version of a feature) so that you can turn it on/off using a configuration setting. That one little design decision simplifies your deployments and lets you do a whole lot of different things like private betas, A/B testing, and feature rollbacks. But best of all, a whole lot less stress because you simply stop worrying so much about how you integrate your code.

Great. So how do you do this with ASP.NET, WebAPI, and JavaScript? Well, it's not always easy. In this session, Ben will discuss why you should care about Feature Flags, what it lets you do, how it'll help your Scrum teams, and also show you how to actually implement them in your applications.

You will learn:

  • What is a feature flag?
  • What is a feature flag deployment?
  • What is A/B testing?
  • How to implement a "private beta" using feature flags