Once you have CI and CD in place, the final step is to remove the need for the push button and fully automate deployment to our production environment.
For a variety of business reasons, it sometimes makes sense not to switch on new features immediately. We can use strategies such as feature toggles to hide or show features once they've been deployed.
Feature toggles enable us to deploy a feature to our production environment behind a toggle or switch, which can be turned on/off at any time without the need to redeploy code. This has a couple of benefits:
- It's rare for a software team to have a testing environment exactly the same as our production environment; it's too expensive. With a feature toggle, however, we are able to selectively turn on the feature and test it.
- This will help us ascertain if our software works well with production-only configurations such as load balancing, caching, replication tiers, and so on.
It gives us a more controllable release strategy. With a feature toggle, we can selectively turn on features for certain user groups, for example, in an alpha testing situation where we want our new features to be seen by a select group.