> then I delete the if statements once the feature becomes permanent and gets released to all users
Doesn't this throw out some of the point of feature flags? That if your production servers are getting hammered, and you're having trouble scaling (for whatever reason), that you can degrade service by toggling off various features which are more resource-intensive so that your service doesn't crash entirely.
Feature toggles implemented through conditional logic seems like an anti-pattern to me. Developers make mistakes, and it's very easy to forget to wrap work around the necessary toggles and accidentally expose not-ready code in production, which may also have security consequences.
It seems to me like a better pattern would be to feature-toggle on an API level, and force developers to plan and commit to relatively stable APIs when they deploy new features to production. This is achieved through an API gateway model - a versioned API is introduced to the gateway, and new versions of services must pass integration testing proving that they adhere to that API before the API gateway will serve the new version of the service with traffic. Developers may introduce new code, and new unstable APIs, and deploy them to production, but they will not be user-facing until a new, stable API is pushed to the API gateway to serve to users. This preserves developer flexibility in pushing new work to production, without exposing that work to the user, until the feature is stabilized and ready.
> Doesn't this throw out some of the point of feature flags?
Not if you're using feature flags as an alternative to branching, nor if your feature flag is intentionally temporary. A branch is temporary, and merging the branch doesn't eliminate the point of branches, right?
For performance toggles you want to keep and use, then definitely just keep those.
> Feature toggles implemented through conditional logic seems like an anti-pattern to me. Developers make mistakes, and it's very easy to forget to wrap work around the necessary toggles
This is a valid concern generally, but in my experience doesn't detract much from the reasons to use feature toggles. In particular, the good examples you brought up (performance features & API feature toggles) you can't have without conditional logic, so there isn't any choice or alternative, right?
> It seems to me like a better pattern would be to feature-toggle on an API level
That's a good idea when the feature in question is an API feature. Are you a backend kind of person? ;) Lots of features are frontend, lots of features are full-stack. It all just depends on which feature, but generally speaking having API level feature toggles in your toolbelt is a great idea.
Doesn't this throw out some of the point of feature flags? That if your production servers are getting hammered, and you're having trouble scaling (for whatever reason), that you can degrade service by toggling off various features which are more resource-intensive so that your service doesn't crash entirely.
Feature toggles implemented through conditional logic seems like an anti-pattern to me. Developers make mistakes, and it's very easy to forget to wrap work around the necessary toggles and accidentally expose not-ready code in production, which may also have security consequences.
It seems to me like a better pattern would be to feature-toggle on an API level, and force developers to plan and commit to relatively stable APIs when they deploy new features to production. This is achieved through an API gateway model - a versioned API is introduced to the gateway, and new versions of services must pass integration testing proving that they adhere to that API before the API gateway will serve the new version of the service with traffic. Developers may introduce new code, and new unstable APIs, and deploy them to production, but they will not be user-facing until a new, stable API is pushed to the API gateway to serve to users. This preserves developer flexibility in pushing new work to production, without exposing that work to the user, until the feature is stabilized and ready.