switches

Feature Switches, also known as Feature Flags or Feature Toggles, are a software development technique that allows teams to modify system behavior without altering or redeploying code, enabling dynamic control over feature availability. They support practices like continuous deployment, A/B…

Key facts

First appeared
1970
Category
technology
Problem solved
Feature Switches solve the challenges of deploying new features rapidly and safely in production without risking widespread outages, enabling gradual rollouts, experimentation via A/B tests, quick kill switches for failures, and decoupling deployment from feature release to support continuous delivery pipelines.
Platforms
Any platform with runtime configurability (web, mobile, desktop, cloud)

Related technologies

Notable users

  • Netflix
  • Google
  • Amazon
  • Facebook (Meta)
  • Microsoft