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Cloudflare Flagship
- EFLKumo 4mo agoWorth noticing a Vercel equivalent: https://github.com/vercel/flags https://github.com/vercel/flags
- fastball 4mo agoThat is actually their SDK / provider agnostic library. The better parallel to this new Cloudflare offering is Vercel Flags[1] (confusing I know) [1] https://vercel.com/docs/flags/vercel-flags https://vercel.com/docs/flags/vercel-flags
- swyx 4mo agoonly 2 hard problems in computer science...
- aetherspawn 4mo agoCloudflare are winning these days, they’re just lacking good fine grained permissions. You still have to make an entirely separate account for prod, which messes up SSO since one domain can only be bound to one account.
- teaearlgraycold 4mo agoJust let everyone have access to prod?
- corvad 4mo agoOne account gets compromised and your doomed. A lot of companies even have prod access be a request based system. Most modern security models with zero trust don't let everyone have access to everything, quite the opposite.
- toomuchtodo 4mo agoPoor access and change management governance.
- greenchair 4mo agohooboy that was a good one!
- atsaloli 4mo agoYes! I just opened a support case today asking for more fine grained permissions.
- pupppet 4mo agoAfter years of AWS I gave Cloudflare a whirl and loved the UX but ultimately retreated back due to the same concern. They are so close though..
- corvad 4mo agoTheir products are cool and I've been happy with them over the years, but their blog right now has had some blunders recently. Also their reliability seems to have been having trouble but does seem better recently.
- wilj 4mo agoThis is exactly what stops me from using them for real work. I love their free tier for my hobby stuff.
- wahnfrieden 4mo agoWill never use them without prepayment or spending limit options. Insane to be a bug, attack, or misclick away from 6-7 digit invoice
- weird-eye-issue 4mo agoTheir pricing is not ridiculous like some providers. It would be very hard to rack up that kind of bill, especially considering their rate limiting rules are now free to use.
- behindsight 4mo agothe CTO of Cloudflare (hn: dknecht) said: > It is in the works. The billing team has been sprinting to fix a lot of debt in this area. I don’t have a date. https://x.com/dok2001/status/2051220429973389622 https://x.com/dok2001/status/2051220429973389622
- wahnfrieden 4mo agoGreat thanks
- willsmith72 4mo agoYep I made the switch a couple of years ago for all of my projects and never looked back. Workers, D1, R2, queues, containers, KV Still using AWS for email sending so that will be great when it comes
- corvad 4mo agoIt already came if you use workers I believe, still in beta though. I would love to switch to it but I still need the SMTP interface though. https://developers.cloudflare.com/email-service/ https://developers.cloudflare.com/email-service/
- willsmith72 4mo agowow thanks. I saw the initial announcement when it was still in private beta, but have been less online lately and missed the public launch. Awesome!!
- h4ch1 4mo agoE-mail sending is in beta afaik, you need the Workers paid plan to use it.
- willsmith72 4mo agothank you!! missed the public launch
- JackSlateur 4mo agoNot sure what they are winning .. we kept them as a backup but they are so bad that they fail even there
- EGreg 4mo agoIf anyone is interested, you can implement something like that with a few lines of code on the front end. We expose a function that generates a uniformly-distributed hash that you can use for A/B testing and other uses: Q.Data.variant() https://github.com/Qbix/Q.js/blob/main/src/js/Q.minimal.js#L9842C2-L9858C3 https://github.com/Qbix/Q.js/blob/main/src/js/Q.minimal.js#L... And on the back end, you'd use it like this: https://github.com/Qbix/Platform/blob/main/platform/classes/Q/Data.php#L607 https://github.com/Qbix/Platform/blob/main/platform/classes/... Essentially, this can support a huge number of "variants" and within each variant you can have N equal segments. That will help you do A/B testing and flipping features on or off.
- OsrsNeedsf2P 4mo agoHas anyone struggled to run their own feature flagging service? After root causing slow app starts to be caused by the equivalent offering from Firebase, I've been cautious to use any off the shelf solutions
- dboreham 4mo agoIt's literally a field in your database. I could never fathom why this needs to be an outsourced service never mind an entire company.
- tuananh 4mo agowhen started, yes. but then you want segment (how you segment your user), rollout strategy, etc.. it will get complicated fast
- youngprogrammer 4mo agoIt can get complicated quickly if you're actually using it in a production system. At my prev enterprise saas company we had feature flags that could be turned on per customer / per environment (dev, staging, prod) with permission + logging model such that our support team could also toggle flags with history of who turned on what. We also had "per user" feature flags for certain test users at companies and had DSL rules to evaluate the features
- OccamsMirror 4mo agoThank you! I've never understood why this needs to be an external dependency with network requests.
- glasshug 4mo agoOpenFeature was new to me, neat! Anyone have experience integrating this? https://openfeature.dev https://openfeature.dev
- Atotalnoob 4mo agoIt’s pretty useful. We used it at a previous company. We built a custom backend, but used the spec and SDKs. It took like 2 weeks to build a full custom backend. SDKs across languages worked flawlessly (okay, we did find one bug, reported it, and it was fixed within the day)
- melwell64 4mo agoI have had a lot of experience with OpenFeature, and have early commits in a few of the client libraries. It's definitely the future of feature flagging, and the ecosystem is really growing. Full disclosure, I am the CTO of Flagsmith, and we have seen a clear curve in adoption of OpenFeature over the last few years. It used to be that we were pushing customers to try it out, now they come to us with OpenFeature as a requirement. The vendor support is pretty mature now and there is coverage across almost all languages. If you're integrating feature flags into a new service, or looking to migrate from e.g. home-grown to a third party solution, OpenFeature is definitely the way I would recommend going.
- throwaway613746 4mo agoFeature flags are so ridiculously simple I have never needed to outsource this to someone else.
- odie5533 4mo agoDo your running services receive streaming updates when Flags are toggled? Is your rule-engine evaluated locally?
- tiffanyh 4mo agoThis is nice, but I’m still waiting for this to be delivered (which ironically is probably using Flagship): https://blog.cloudflare.com/enterprise-grade-features-for-all/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/enterprise-grade-features-for-al... —- I don’t believe a single enterprise only feature has made its way to lower tier (paid) account yet. I’m most interested in: https://developers.cloudflare.com/speed/optimization/content/prefetch-urls/ https://developers.cloudflare.com/speed/optimization/content...
- 7thpower 4mo agoYes, this! I am dying for need of zerotrust enterprise features and am about to have to actually talk to one of the enterprise sales folks, which will chew up a bunch of time and add stress I’d rather avoid.
- tiffanyh 4mo agoI don’t think zero trust will be anytime soon, based on this post: https://community.cloudflare.com/t/making-enterprise-products-available-to-everyone-share-your-feedback/914296/3 https://community.cloudflare.com/t/making-enterprise-product...
- 7thpower 4mo agoAppreciate the gentle let down.
- nijave 4mo agoFwiw I didn't think Cloudflare sales was too bad when we dealt with them a year ago--at least compared to some companies.
- 7thpower 4mo agoJust sent a request, fingers crossed.
- crabmusket 4mo agoLooking at the docs for their JS SDK, they have this warning: > The client provider requires an API token to fetch flag values. This token is not scoped to a single app, so anyone with the token can evaluate flags across all apps in your account. Use the client provider with caution in public-facing applications. https://developers.cloudflare.com/flagship/sdk/client-provider/ https://developers.cloudflare.com/flagship/sdk/client-provid... Can anyone clarify... why the client SDK, designed to be deployed to browsers, requires caution? Does this mean that any client could send requests with a new targetingKey and observe other users' flags? While flags probably shouldn't be critical information, this seems like an interesting design choice.
- OptionOfT 4mo agoLet's think about it. This is probably something used internally at CloudFlare and someone thought I'd be interesting to make it public. There is no way 6 months ago someone at CloudFlare thought it was a good idea to build a competitor to say LaunchDarkly.
- wahnfrieden 4mo agoCare to share why
- jasonjmcghee 4mo agoHmm not sure I necessarily agree. Cloudflare's strategy has been looking like "the only platform you need" for a while now. Their recent features / announcements have been equivalent to: (LaunchDarkly) Resend, Firecrawl, CrewAI, Helicone, Replicate, Pinecone - Which like… many companies have a painful procurement process. If all you need is Cloudflare, and prices are within reason- why not use them
- stingraycharles 4mo agoDon’t forget they now also have an OpenRouter alternative.
- pm90 4mo agoMore of this please: essential tools for building modern software must be oss; Im fine with paying for a hosted version but just the benefit of learning one tool and being able to use it everywhere (linux, k8s, python etc) is amazing.
- isodev 4mo agoCloudflare oss?
- maxdo 4mo agoa flagship with no pirates, all fired due to ai.
- ec109685 4mo agoMissing gradual rollout of feature flag changes themselves. Yes, you can do percentage based rollouts for individual features but still should have ability to canary all changes before they cause an insta-sev.
- zuzululu 4mo agoA bit tangent but related: These things I'm never sure if I should be shipping on day one with mobile apps (Flutter in particular): Flagships, bug gathering, A/B testing ? I feel strong inclination too but its also way too early before any real users can prove PMF. I've been using Google stuff but wonder if Flagship and perhaps other Cloudflare offerings can help. The other side is that again it feels too early for this stuff and I just want to ship something quickly. The work ivnvolved
- btown 4mo agoNever underestimate the power of a zero-network-hop abstraction over f(feature_name, context). And context can be extremely tailored to your niche: specific inventory, from a specific supplier, for a specific user of a specific B2B client of a specific business model subtype, who should or shouldn’t see certain features on that specific inventory at certain times. When you can write your own logic, and just run this in a tight loop as easily and performantly as you can use a constant, it makes your business incredibly agile. Think some text might change for some customers? Just write the code to make it configurable, and you get tests and flags for free. Sadly, that zero-hop setup requires a sophisticated client execution engine, which it doesn’t appear Cloudflare has implemented here. Makes sense for their memory constrained workers, less sense for traditional infrastructure. Statsig has an approach here that I quite like: > To be able to do this, Server SDKs hold the entire ruleset of your project in memory - a representation of each gate or experiment in JSON. On client SDKs, we evaluate all of the gates/experiments when you call initialize - on our servers. https://docs.statsig.com/sdks/how-evaluation-works https://docs.statsig.com/sdks/how-evaluation-works You can also roll your own - just sync your rulesets to a few data structures every few seconds in a background thread and atomically swap the reference to them. Then you just need a CRUD interface over the applicability ruleset dimensions. Just be careful to have governance on who can play with which would-be constants. Great power and great responsibility and all that!
- chrisweekly 4mo agoGood advice. I'll add a protip / reminder that feature flags, AB tests, and entitlements are three distinct concepts. This blog post (no affiliation) has framing I found helpful: https://www.stigg.io/blog-posts/entitlements-untangled-the-modern-way-to-software-monetization https://www.stigg.io/blog-posts/entitlements-untangled-the-m...
- BatteryMountain 4mo agoAmazing resource, thanks!
- Ayush_Khati1 4mo ago[flagged]
- elamje 4mo agoI’m always excited when Cloudflare starts offering things that I had to use other providers for because I know it will be solid. We used Statsig at Function. It started out as 2 of us using it on one product and within 12 months, large amounts of our product copy and rollouts were driven off of it. Statsig has client side evals so you can write rules and rollouts based on internal concepts without Statsig’s servers processing a piece of user data. Hoping Cloudflare can build a sophisticated product here so I don’t have use another product in the future!
- w-ll 4mo agoyou use a 3rd party for feature flags? im not "roll my own" for everything but feature flags have not been an issue to roll
- willsmith72 4mo agoThere's feature flags then there's staged rollouts gated by multiple variables with statistical analysis
- swyx 4mo agoi see @btown's comment below but also just for education about this space: - anyone have comments/comparisons about launchdarkly vs posthog vs statsig (is it still alive after openai?) vs _____ vs cloudflare flagship? like a "beginner/intermediate/advanced" progression of what to look out for/what you will want when it comes to feature flags would be highly helpful for me and many others here
- etothet 4mo agoI don’t have experience with the tools Cloudflare has been shipping this year so I can’t speak about the quality, but they have really been pushing out a lot new products and services, no doubt due to agentic coding.
- Ayush_Khati1 4mo ago[flagged]
- qzgrid37 4mo ago[dead]
- tuananh 4mo agothis make perfect sense for cloudflare. and im sure they can drive down the cost , compared to say launchdarkly
- GeorgeWoff25 4mo agoI love their free tier but for playful stuff
- jazzpush2 4mo agoThis is what "Building for the future" looks like post-layoffs, huh? Can't even ship with app-scoped tokens...
- ericand 4mo agoI like the name
- iTokio 4mo agoFeature flags are often ridiculously over engineered. Check a config, bdd value, env var to dynamically go one path or the other. That’s all, you must either have a small feature or refactor the code to easily switch at a high level. If you are not able to do so easily, then yes, complex feature flags implementations might help you, to coordinate feature activation between micro services. Or if you have many features then a dashboard might be useful. But I would argue that both are serious indicators that you should avoid feature flags, they are better for local and temporary changes, otherwise the complexity compounds and it become hard to manage and maintain.
- LaurensBER 4mo agoThere's an argument to be made for being able to turn on a feature for a certain segment (e.g low revenue users in Italy) so you can see what the business/performance impact is. Ofcourse you don't want users to lose the feature once they exceeded your revenue threshold or cross the border so you'll need to implement some kind of tracking. Your analytics and error tracking also needs to communicate with the feature flag service. Definitely not rocket science but more complex than a environment variable.
- bfivyvysj 4mo agoEnterprise software is full of this kind of stuff. Half our customers are on year old UI's because they don't want to re-up contracts yet. That is, features are contractual and when you've only got 50 customers but they're all paying high 6 figures does anyone really care about feature flag complexity?
- greatgib 4mo agoIt is like over-engineered if you have that as feature flag instead of just in the customer configuration... "The customer would like the main page blue and another one the red". Would it be feature flag for you?
- weego 4mo agoThere's an argument to be made for being able to turn on a feature for a certain segment Not just an argument, it's the entire point of feature flags for ui experiments which is an essential practice. Dynamic adjustment of the cohorts (or even just an immediate kill switch if it's a disaster) is required.
- bluelightning2k 4mo agoI've never understood feature flags. How are they fundamentally different to a Boolean in a database?
- youre-wrong3 4mo agoThat’s all it is. This only exists to lock you into cloudflare even more.
- hn_throwaway_99 4mo agoThen why did they deliberately make it compatible with Open Feature, explicitly making it easy to swap out a different Open Feature provider? Oh, that's right, you just spouted a "big company bad" mantra without bothering to read the article. Look, I know saying RTFA goes against the HN guidelines, but the amount of increasingly lazy spew i see from folks (or bots) who haven't bothered to read the article is so tiresome and annoying.
- youre-wrong3 4mo agoOh look. Found the guy who’s taken it hook line and sinker.
- ZeWaka 4mo agoThey're not always booleans - for example, we often see feature flags being used for A/B rollouts. Cloudflare themselves even uses them internally as such, by shipping new features/builds to their free customers first, and then progressively larger customers after a settling period. Feature flags can also be randomly turned on, for a sort of fuzz testing. Don't think of them just as 'new things' - it could be 'changed behavior'. I guess you could think of them as a boolean on every client but they're generally not implemented that way.
- nijave 4mo agoReally any "constant". Failure thresholds, timeouts, API versions or endpoints, LLM model id
- paulbjensen 4mo agoGold-plated booleans-as-a-service
- fcpk 4mo agoMVP
- ramon156 4mo agoI don't mind it. I don't want to keep track of thousands of feature flags in my DB, have to create an admin dash, etc. You could call any SaaS tool "excel-as-a-service" and it would hold the same power as your comment.
- 5701652400 4mo agoor maybe just make single JSON and commit it to git? your http server + GitHub + JSON and text editor is your admin ui, audit, etc.
- tom1337 4mo agohow would a single JSON allow staged rollouts with sticky sessions?
- pavo-etc 4mo agoyou pick a frequency you want, represent that as a fraction, and modulo on user id, and your 80% of the way there
- nijave 4mo agoAssuming you want a random distribution and don't want to take any other attributes into account. We're a small company but new feature release for big features is typically targeted at low risk users/customers first. That usually means a few attributes are taken into account (age, customer value, customer sentiment, which features they use)
- piterrro 4mo agoI would happily pay for safely-remove-old-feature-flags-from-the-code-as-a-service.
- 5701652400 4mo agonever understood this. why follow over-engineered standard and depend on 3rd party API spec, and 3rd party vendor. if you cannot call home from your service, you having bigger problems. and once you can call home, it is just.. single json file.
- jwr 4mo agoAm I the only one worried about Cloudflare becoming too powerful? We went through this with E-mail: we slept through the period when Google, Microsoft and AWS were growing, and we ended up with them dictating the terms. Today I get 90% of my spam from Google, Microsoft and AWS and they don't care: they can safely ignore spam reports, because at this point they are Too Big to Block. I have a feeling we are moving towards the same problem with Cloudflare and the web. Tomorrow Cloudflare will start dictating what we can or cannot do and we will not be able to do anything about it. This has already begun: their arbitrary "bot-filtering" for example.
- xboxnolifes 4mo ago> Am I the only one worried about Cloudflare becoming too powerful? No, it gets brought up in every single thread about cloud flare. And if this wasnt a feature release that people seem to like, the top comment would probably be talking about how cloudflare is terrible for the internet.
- Rp8yXmdmr 4mo agoCloudflare is already too powerful, their anti DDOS solution is just too good. But their serverless products/features don't really build on that, they are just another hosting company.
- rahadbhuiya 4mo ago[dead]
- alper 4mo agoAnybody and everybody could use a mature LaunchDarkly alternative.
- cat-whisperer 4mo agois it similar to vercel flags?
- Bolin-Weng_666 4mo ago[flagged]
- chrisss395 4mo agoI'm out of my league on this discussion, but it reminds me of the Configuration Database (CDB) used for most modern aircraft.
- 34asjh 4mo agoFix your stupid Turnstile that blocks humans first. You are gatekeeping the whole Internet. Even Anubis works better than the Clownflare garbage.
- misbau 4mo agoI am a mere mortal when it comes to understanding the technicalities, but I know i find it relatively easy to use Cloudflare and all I want to say is keep up the good work.
- matheusmoreira 4mo agoIndeed. Best DNS registrar I've ever used.
- strongpigeon 4mo agoI really liked Google Domains, but alas…
- ashvardanian 4mo agoI really like the speed at which Cloudflare is executing toward becoming a critical infrastructure player with all of those new product offerings. That said, not everything needs to be serverless. Their Gen 13 hardware looks impressive, and it’s a pity you can’t rent it by the hour like AWS EC2 Metal instances.
- desireco42 4mo agoI love direction and features Claudflare is taking, they are really impressive. And since I use their service on several projects, I can say I am overall very happy with service. Only thing, they are going strongly in AWS territory and not in any good way. Finding what I need and what I use has become harder as times go by. By contast, Azure (MS) even though it looks crazy complex, once you get used to it, you can find things.
- brachkow 4mo agoFunny that my app already uses custom feature flag solution built on... Cloudlfare Workers
- JohnStoner1212 4mo ago[dead]
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]