[HN Gopher] Launch HN: DevCycle (YC W14) - a feature flag platfo...
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Launch HN: DevCycle (YC W14) - a feature flag platform built for
developers
Hi HN, Cobi here, Co-Founder of DevCycle (https://devcycle.com).
DevCycle is a feature flag platform focused on developer
experience, speed of delivery and long-term maintainability. To
give the platform a shot, anyone can sign up and use DevCycle for
free here: https://devcycle.com Here's a general platform demo
video if you're interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZD-
pyKGwR4 Feature flagging is a technique that lets developers
switch features on or off in a software application without
redeploying it, enhancing testing and rollback capabilities. At
their core, feature flagging platforms solve the problem of
separating production code deploys from feature releases to users.
While DevCycle solves that same general pain, we also aim to solve
core problems in developer experience and code maintainability that
hold developers back from fully adopting feature flagging into
their workflow. In traditional feature flagging platforms,
extended flag usage increases code complexity over time. Most
engineers with feature flagging experience are worried about the
build-up of stale flags and their code being filled with
unnecessary conditionals. Dealing with this problem is important
because if an engineer is worried about this increasing complexity,
they are likely to avoid using feature flags. We came upon this
problem when we were building Taplytics, the startup we joined YC
with. We experienced it not only from our own struggles with
feature flagging and transitioning to continuous deployment but
also from our time spent with Taplytics customers who were often on
the same journey. Given this experience, we developed DevCycle
with a few core differences in how we solve these problems.
Features, Not Just Flags: Many in-house and competitive feature
flag systems operate on the simple idea that features exist in a
binary state - they are either 'ON' or 'OFF.' In reality, software
is never this simple. DevCycle treats features the same way you do
in every other context, by attaching highly-extensible remote
configuration to every feature in your product, allowing multiple
flags to be combined under the context of a single feature and
configured together. Developer Experience: To get the benefits of
feature flagging you need broad adoption by all developers touching
a codebase. Our primary goal is to provide the best developer
experience possible. Providing tools and integrations so we can get
out of developers' way. For example, to address the problem of
long-running feature flags that build up over time, we offer
developer-facing features to easily track, detect (deploy pipeline
actions), and eventually remove unnecessary technical debt (CLI
code cleanup commands). Given that we are building this as a
developer-first product, we'd love your feedback on whether our
approach better fits your workflow and any other thoughts on our
solution. Thanks so much!
Author : cdrux
Score : 44 points
Date : 2023-06-12 15:46 UTC (7 hours ago)
| ushakov wrote:
| I like the domain name.
|
| But isn't feature flag management market too crowded by now?
|
| Why should DevCycle be allowed to exist?
| jonathannorris wrote:
| (DevCycle Co-Founder & CTO here) The truth of the Feature
| Flagging market is the vast majority of engineering teams
| aren't using a third-party tool for Feature Flagging. Most
| teams are using an internal system (Environment Variables,
| Database flags, S3 files ect.) or not doing any feature
| flagging. The potential for the Feature Flagging market is as
| large as any other developer tools market, and the challenge is
| to build a product with a better developer experience that
| encourages the adoption of feature flags and integrates with
| team's workflows.
|
| We've been in the A/B + Feature flagging space for about ten
| years with our visual A/B testing-focused product Taplytics
| (W14), so I'd say we have lots of experience running Feature
| Flags + A/B tests at scale. We've learned a lot from our
| customers over the years and were excited to build DevCycle as
| a green-field project from those lessons. If you are
| interested, try it out and we are always open to direct
| feedback.
| esafak wrote:
| Alternatively, why should I pick you, when there are so many
| alternatives?
| xwowsersx wrote:
| How do Launch HNs work exactly? Is any group that was part of any
| YC batch allowed to do a Launch HN and continue to do so each
| time they pivot? I don't have an issue with this, I'm just trying
| to understand why a startup that was in the Winter 2014 batch is
| doing a Launch HN nearly nine years later. Presumably they
| pivoted several times, perhaps from something not even remotely
| related to feature flags?
|
| I know some of the details of how to submit a Launch HN are
| described here https://news.ycombinator.com/yli.html but doesn't
| quite answer my questions. Just curious!
| jxf wrote:
| If I understand correctly, DevCycle is new, but Taplytics (from
| that YC batch) is the parent. DevCycle doesn't seem to be a
| decade old.
| jedberg wrote:
| How do you differ from LaunchDarkly?
| cdrux wrote:
| Hey, thanks for the question.
|
| The primary differences stem from a difference in focus. We
| believe that LaunchDarkly is a great first-mover in the space
| and has done well in their validation of the space. Their focus
| has traditionally been on the enterprise, which manifests
| itself in a product focus on things that large enterprises
| require, like tooling around governance.
|
| For DevCycle we believe feature flagging is about more than
| just enterprise risk management, and is actually more deeply
| related to the way in which teams build and ship code together.
| As such, our focus is on the developer experience and mapping
| our product more closely to how developers actually work.
|
| This manifests itself in a few key areas: 1. We believe that
| all of the interfaces that engineers interact with need to be
| delightful including SDKs, APIs, CLIs, docs, etc. 2. We've
| built DevCycle from the ground up to better match to a concept
| of building features, with coordinated releases vs distinct and
| disparate feature flags. What this means is that we natively
| bundle feature flags within the concept of a feature, so that a
| feature and all of its component flags can be rolled out in
| coordination without the need for workflow automations. 3. It
| should be as easy to remove our flags as it is to create them,
| to reduce the cognitive load and complexity of feature flagging
| over time. 4. All aspects of the platform from the way its
| built, to the way it is priced (seat based pricing vs usage
| based pricing) should make it as easy as possible to have all
| engineers on a team be able to work together on feature flags,
| as opposed to creating friction and complexity that reduces the
| number of people that interact with flags on a daily basis.
|
| I hope that helps, if I can clarify further let me know.
| VicVee wrote:
| Hey I'm one of the product folk here at DevCycle.
|
| I have a feeling someone else is going to respond with some
| other points so I wanted to touch on something particular:
|
| From my view, I just personally think most folks should be
| using feature flags and a continuous deployment cycle in
| general. With that in mind, a lot of what we built was to make
| it more accessible. We focused on an easier to understand UX,
| and building tools that were easy to interact with.
|
| But most importantly in that line of thinking, and a major
| differentiator in my eyes, we tried to make as much of our
| platform un-gated as possible.
|
| So all of our features are available to anyone regardless of
| their plan (outside of anything that requires a custom setup or
| something truly enterprisey).
|
| This means that all of our integrations are freely available
| too.
| conqrr wrote:
| Congrats on the launch! Will be great if you can shed some light
| on your initial customer acquisition journey. How did you go
| about marketing and finding the first few customers?
| cdrux wrote:
| Hey, thanks so much!
|
| This is an interesting question, given our unique situation, as
| DevCycle is effectively a startup within a startup.
|
| As I mentioned in the post, we created DevCycle because of a
| need we saw among our customers at Taplytics. So in terms of
| finding first customers, our primary goal was to make DevCycle
| better than Taplytics for this specific use case as quickly as
| possible. Once we got to a minimum viable product that was
| sufficiently good, the conversation with relevant customers at
| Taplytics was easy, because we were able to point to a product
| that better fit critical use cases for them.
|
| Beyond those customers, because our focus is on Developer
| Experience we are taking a Developer-Led approach to customer
| acquisition. So this means trying as best as we can to write
| and create quality content, sponsoring developer-focused
| podcasts/twitch streams, etc. It also means meeting developers
| where they already are, and supporting others that are building
| amazing communities. So we are trying to be very active
| participants in communities like OpenFeature.
|
| We for sure have a long way to go, but from a product and
| engineering perspective, it's nice for the team to be able to
| feel like they can participate in the customer acquisition
| journey by just talking about the interesting challenges they
| are facing day-to-day.
| Kinrany wrote:
| Aren't non-binary flags even worse from the point of view of
| deleting them?
|
| There is a very good reason feature flags are binary: they start
| in one state and end in the other.
| cdrux wrote:
| This is definitely an interesting challenge you bring up.
|
| I think regardless of the how difficult it is to remove a non-
| binary flag, the market has moved feature flagging away from
| just binary and merged with the concepts of remote
| configuration and experimentation, both of which require more
| than just ON/OFF states.
|
| For us, we're not trying to shy away from that challenge, so it
| forces us to come up with interesting solutions to the problem.
|
| A couple ways we're solving for this problem are:
|
| 1. Variable Schemas - We just launched a feature that allows
| for engineers to strictly define the acceptable values of any
| feature flag they are creating, so that as other team members
| interact with those flags, there are programmatic controls in
| place that create guardrails on the input. This also does
| double-duty in creating strongly typed code, so that usage in
| code is clear, easy to navigate, use and cleanup when the time
| comes.
|
| 2. Code Cleanup - An example of one of those solutions is our
| Code Cleanup CLI command. Regardless of what the flag type is
| (boolean, number, string, JSON) you can provide the prompt with
| what you would like the end state to be and the AST logic built
| into the CLI will create a proposed diff for your code wherever
| a DevCycle flag exists which you can then either edit further
| or submit directly for a PR.
|
| I 100% agree non-binary flags present a challenge, but we are
| definitely interested in finding unique ways to solve that
| problem.
| David_Axelrod wrote:
| We use growthbook and love it. In what ways do you differ?
| cdrux wrote:
| Hey, awesome that you use Growthbook. They seem to be doing an
| amazing job on the data and analytics space tied to A/B testing
| and feature flagging.
|
| Our perspective differs from Growthbook's in that we don't want
| to replace your analytics source of truth in any way. Product
| analytics has come a long way in the last few years with a lot
| of truly amazing players like Mixpanel, Amplitude, Looker or
| almost countless others.
|
| Our core focus is developers and the developer experience.
|
| What that means is that we're trying to avoid adding features
| and functionalities that would be directly competitive to
| analytics providers, and instead be better at integrating with
| those tools, so you can manage your flags in DevCycle and do
| your flag and experiment analysis directly in your team's
| source of truth.
|
| At the moment what this means for our product roadmap is that
| we're working on things like a feature rich CLI, Typescript
| enhancements, automatic code cleanup, etc and we're hoping to
| continue to head down the road of developer experience as
| opposed to building non-developer tooling.
| danpalmer wrote:
| Something I love about the experiment tooling I've used at a few
| places now (Thread, Google) is the fact that state has typically
| been stored in source control. i.e. not just the usage of flags
| in code, but the rollout/experiment definitions, the state of how
| much traffic is allocated to each branch, eligibility
| requirements, etc. This makes it easy to see what the current
| state is (without going to a UI), and also makes it much easier
| to build tooling around that state, as the API data sync problem
| disappears.
|
| Looking at DevCycle, it seems you've not taken this approach, is
| that right? Scanning your docs it seems there's an API to update
| state, but that fundamentally it's kept in your database, not in
| code. In my experience this isn't the best dev experience, so as
| dev experience is your USP, I'm interested in why you think this
| is a better experience, what benefits it can bring over a "git-
| ops" style, or what I've missed in your docs.
| 2023throwawayy wrote:
| Feature flags in source control seems to be missing the point.
|
| Separating feature flags and source let's you decouple your
| code releases from your feature releases. Requiring a deploy of
| new to code to enable or disable a feature seems to negate
| almost all of the benefit of using feature flags to begin with.
| aleksiy123 wrote:
| They don't necessarily have to rolled out as part of the same
| release process. You can still decouple them without giving
| up them being version controlled which to me is also
| preferable over just toggling things through a gui.
|
| Having a release process for flags also allows you to run
| integration tests with those flags, canary alerting and
| automated rollbacks.
| danpalmer wrote:
| Yes this is how I view it. Just because it's in code
| doesn't mean it's the same codebase, same deployment
| process, same servers, or anything else. Code is the source
| of truth and log of how that truth changed over time.
| esafak wrote:
| How did you represent the features flags in source control?
| jonathannorris wrote:
| Really interesting take on your experience with experimentation
| / feature flags and wanting it to be more stateful in code. I
| assume that follows the more Terraform-like infrastructure as
| code approach, which certainly makes sense to rollout
| infrastructure changes. We have a V1 of a Terraform provider
| where we hope to enable more control through terraform to
| manage infrastructure changes directly, but you are correct
| that has yet to be our core focus. Another way we hope to
| expose that state outside of our UI is building out a great
| CLI, which we are actively working on.
|
| Our primary usecase has been working with product development
| teams who have adopted Feature Flags as part of their
| workflows, using DevCycle to help them deploy features faster /
| safer to their end users, even deploying continuously as we do.
| Generally, customers integrate DevCycle into their Websites /
| Mobile Apps + API servers to control those feature deployments.
| We have had a couple of customers use us at the infrastructure
| layer. One of the best use cases I've seen is in a proxy
| service controlling the rollout of a new infrastructure stack.
| I'd love to dig into this use-case deeper and see how we can
| better support it in the future, "Ops" flags are one of the
| flag types we are looking to support.
|
| I would say that for customers looking to disconnect the
| deployment of code from the release of features, our approach
| where you can "release" features at any time has many
| advantages over "git-ops" style configurations. But certainly,
| for Ops use-cases where you are controlling infrastructure
| changes, we are believers in "git-ops" and use it ourselves.
| The challenge comes with how to connect those two deployment
| styles effectively.
| danpalmer wrote:
| Thanks for the detailed reply, although I feel like I may
| have miscommunicated the aim here. I'm not really thinking
| about what is being launched, but how, and where the truth
| lives.
|
| A CLI is certainly a nice feature, but brings decisions that
| need to be made: who runs it, where do they run it, when, how
| do you know what was run, how do you deploy the CLI, and so
| on. The same can be said for, say, running your test suite -
| and the solution there is to have CI do it for you. Sure you
| can run, but the run that matters is the one when you merge
| your branch and that's done in a controlled environment
| typically defined in code.
|
| Rolling out features/flags is the same, and I think if the
| state of all the flags, features, traffic allocations,
| targeting, and so on, is all defined in code, then all those
| questions you get with a CLI go away. Who runs it? An
| automated process. Where do they run it? In a controlled
| environment, not on a dev machine. How do you know what was
| run? It's all there in code. How do you deploy the CLI? You
| don't need to.
|
| > for customers looking to disconnect the deployment of code
| from the release of features, our approach where you can
| "release" features at any time has many advantages over "git-
| ops" style configurations
|
| I'm interested as to why you say this has many advantages,
| because I don't see why a git based workflow couldn't run
| this. You could for example have DevCycle subscribe to the
| notifications for the git repo and update its internal state
| any time new changes are made to the git repo. That would be
| preferable over a UI or CLI because the whole state is there
| in a machine readable format ready for tooling to use.
| jdwyah wrote:
| Prefab has something that you could use in more or less
| this way. The value of the flag can come from different
| sources and there is a defined order precedence. The base
| levels are default yaml files, which would be committed in
| your project. We think of live values from the server as a
| "potential override". So if you only wanted things in git
| you could just not use the UI. Details in
| https://docs.prefab.cloud/docs/explanations/bootstrapping
|
| I'm spike-ing on some similar/adjacent things right now
| actually if you want to jam. I won't claim that what exists
| today is very polished for your usage pattern.
| jonathannorris wrote:
| You can use a git-based workflow for feature flags, that's
| likely how most teams will start using flags in their code
| with environment variables and infrastructure state.
| However, most deployment pipelines in the wild are very
| slow and owned by engineering, limiting the value of doing
| git-based state for your Feature Flags.
|
| I've seen that disconnecting the deployment of code from
| releasing of features can be transformative in various ways
| that fit better with an API-based model for Feature Flags:
|
| - Many flags / remote config changes in production
| environments are made by non-developer members of a team.
|
| - Coordinating releases across multiple platforms that have
| different deployment cycles. For example, deploying a new
| feature to Mobile + Web + APIs simultaneously.
|
| - Enabling / disabling flags in real-time across your stack
| to respond to incidents.
|
| - Support / Sales teams using Flags to gate features for
| customers.
|
| - Remote config to populate data for UIs, to act as a CDN
| for content.
|
| - Rolling out infrastructure changes, being able to roll
| back changes instantly without another deployment.
|
| (And for context: our Feature Flag decisioning is done
| locally for our local bucketing server SDKs)
| esafak wrote:
| I don't think using source control is incompatible with
| this. You can persist state in source control, and have a
| separate deployment pipeline that is triggered only for
| updates to feature flag files. It is also deployed
| separately; e.g., to a key-value store.
| aleksiy123 wrote:
| I put this in another comment, but disconnecting of code
| and feature release can still be achieved while storing
| feature flags as code. You need to build out a seperate
| pipeline and release process. With this you can still
| achieve all the advantages that you listed out.
|
| I think the key difference is if you consider feature
| flags to be configuration and believe in configuration as
| code as a best practice.
|
| I think this is the right approach in the long term.
| People having the ability to modify configuration in
| production in real time is an outage waiting to happen
| without having an obvious way to rollback to previously
| known working state.
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