Announcing: Public APIs for Feature Flags

We’re thrilled to announce the addition of public-facing APIs to Harness Feature Flags. Users of Feature Flags now have the option to work entirely in code to create, edit, and manage feature flags.

Can’t I Work In Code Instead of a UI?

As nifty as a UI is, it’s not always the most efficient way to get a job done. While UIs provide visual clarity and functionality such as dashboards or reporting, those aren’t always relevant on the job from day to day. Especially for developers who already have too many tools and UIs, there needs to be a more efficient way to manage feature flags.

We talked in a previous post about the Harness Feature Flags Git Sync and why it’s important for developers to be able to work how it best suits them. While there are many tools and ways to solve problems that developers face, the commonality between the work all developers do is that they work in code.

You can imagine, for something like a feature management system, the day-to-day is making new flags, editing existing ones, and managing the impact radius to customers. This is very similar to what a dev might do with any database – but they don’t do database queries or make changes in a UI, they do it in code.

Making Feature Flag Development Simpler

The answer to this is simple: let devs work in code. The management capabilities that are needed through a UI like reporting or dashboarding aren’t always needed, but being able to create, edit, and manage flags are a daily task.

Building on our developer-first ethos here at Harness, we released our own public APIs that Feature Flags users can leverage to create, edit, and manage flags – all in code. Need I say more about the power of APIs?

In addition to being more dev-centric with the tooling, the use of APIs unlocks the ability to create automation feature management processes. This is especially useful for things like new feature rollouts or progressive delivery. Instead of having to manually create new flags or rules for rollouts each time a feature is released or some configuration change is required, teams can programmatically handle this legwork, making feature rollouts even simpler.

You can imagine that for teams that have a large number of flags, involved teams, or a variety of processes involved in feature management, being able to manage all of it in code, in the business logic, can be a huge time and stress saver. And as teams scale up, the use of APIs allows teams to get more clever about how they manage the lifecycle of feature flags – making updates, creating more stringent policies, or deleting flags.

Is it too bold of me to share that we’re going to be solving the critical flag lifecycle management problem soon – something nobody has done yet? The lives of both developers and users of feature flags are going to get significantly easier, with or without using an API call.

How to Get Started

If you’re already a Harness Feature Flags user, you’ll want to head over to the Documentation for the public APIs, which will describe in detail what’s available and how to use it.

And if you haven’t signed up to use Harness yet but want to get started, you can easily sign up for a free trial and put the APIs into action. Happy developing!

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