Feature Toggle Management with Java, Spring Boot, and Unleash UI

In today’s software development process, continuous delivery and quick iteration have become necessity. With this agility comes the need to manage features effectively, controlling their release to users while minimising risk. Feature toggles, offer a great solution to this challenge. By implementing feature toggle management using Java, Spring Boot, and Unleash UI, developers can efficiently control feature rollouts, experiment with new functionalities, and mitigate potential issues and have the option to quickly rollback to the previous working solution.

Understanding Feature Toggles

Feature toggles are conditional statements that enable or disable certain features in an application without altering its codebase. These toggles act as gates that control the visibility of features, allowing developers to release them gradually, target specific user segments, or conduct A/B testing. Feature toggles can be static or dynamic, meaning they can be configured at compile-time or runtime, respectively.

Implementing Feature Toggle Management with Java and Spring Boot

Define feature toggles in your application configuration, either in YAML or properties files. Alternatively, you can store feature toggle states in a database for dynamic configuration.

Add the following property in the properties file:

feature:
   enableNewFeature: true
   enableExperimentalFeature: false

Toggle Implementation

@Component
public class FeatureToggle {

    @Value("${feature.enableNewFeature}")
    private boolean enableNewFeature;

    @Value("${feature.enableExperimentalFeature}")
    private boolean enableExperimentalFeature;

    public boolean isNewFeatureEnabled() {
        return enableNewFeature;
    }

    public boolean isExperimentalFeatureEnabled() {
        return enableExperimentalFeature;
    }
}

Usage in Service Layer

Inject the FeatureToggle component into service classes and use it to control feature behaviour.

@Service
public class MyService {

    @Autowired
    private FeatureToggle featureToggle;

    public void doSomething() {
        if (featureToggle.isNewFeatureEnabled()) {
            // New feature implementation
        } else {
            // Old feature implementation
        }
    }
}

Now the behaviour of method doSomething() can be controlled by enabling/disabling the feature toggles in the properties file. But this requires changes in properties file each time. Here we can utilize Unleash UI.

Utilising Unleash UI for Feature Toggle Management

Managing feature toggles using properties file requires changes every time , having a dedicated user interface simplifies that process and it can be controlled via a simple UI toggle. Unleash UI is an open-source feature toggle management tool that provides a user-friendly interface for toggling features, monitoring their usage, and analysing experiment results.

Integrating Unleash UI with Spring Boot

Add the following dependency to your project:

<dependency>
    <groupId>io.getunleash</groupId>
    <artifactId>springboot-unleash-starter</artifactId>
    <version>Latest version here</version>
</dependency>

Configuration

Configure the Unleash client with the necessary parameters, such as the Unleash server URL and your application name.

io:
  getunleash:
    app-name: <application-name>
    instance-id: <instance-id>
    environment: <environment>
    api-url: <url>
    api-token: <token>

Using Unleash UI

Once configured, we can access the Unleash UI dashboard to manage feature toggles in real-time. This allows you to toggle features on/off, target specific user segments, and monitor feature usage and performance.

Are Feature Toggles Always The Right Option?

Feature toggles present a full range of potential benefits for developers, but they are not always the right option. They come with their own set of risks and challenges.Some of the potential risks are increased technical debt, testing overhead, performance overhead and sometimes we can get stuck in creating too many feature toggles.Hence when to use a feature toggle should be very clear.

When Should You Use Feature Toggles?

When a feature is in the early stages of development, you should consider using a feature toggle to separate the feature from the rest of the code. This means you can then release the feature to a small subset of users before rolling it out to everyone. By keeping things small to start with, you give yourself the necessary space to address bugs as they arise.Feature toggles provide a mechanism for quickly deploying hotfixes or rolling back changes in production. By toggling off a problematic feature, we can mitigate risks and maintain system stability while addressing issues.Some of the use cases are- gradual rollouts, A/B testing, quick hotfixes and rollbacks, feature dependency management, user segmentation, feature experimentation, beta features etc.

Conclusion

In summary, if used properly feature toggles offer a flexible and powerful mechanism for managing feature releases, controlling user experiences, and mitigating risks in software development. By using Java, Spring Boot, and Unleash UI, developers can streamline the process, iterate quickly, experiment effectively, and deliver value to users efficiently.

If interest in reading further please go through the below post:https://martinfowler.com/articles/feature-toggles.html