"I Love Feature Flags!"

Learn about how the IBM Kubernetes Service transformed itself from an enterprise monolith to a cloud native service by fully adopting a progressive delivery model.

“I love feature flags!” is a quote from Jason McGee the VP overseeing IBM Kubernetes Service. This single post in Slack is when we knew we had fundamentally changed how we build, deliver, and operate the IBM Kubernetes Service. Since its incarnation 3 years ago, the IBM Kubernetes Service has been a leader in IBM by pushing the boundaries for tools and culture. We have evolved from a cumbersome monolith to a true cloud native service which manages over 20,000 Kubernetes Clusters. We have embraced feature flags, initially for managing deployments, and now for progressive delivery of new features and operational regions. This talk will cover our journey over the past three years, things we did wrong, things we did right, and where we want to go in the future.

Last year my keynote presentation focused on how we transformed our delivery process to do deployments at scale. This year, I’d like to take a step back and focus more on our journey from building a monolith to practicing progressive delivery of our service. At last year’s conference we had been using LaunchDarkly mostly for code deployments, now we are using feature flags to deliver features and it has transformed the way we plan and execute our new features.