Service meshes and OpenFeature can both handle canary and progressive rollouts. Both let you reduce risk when shipping change. The approaches differ a lot, though, and since we keep getting asked about this, it's time to tackle it.
We want to be honest here. Our goal is to show the different approaches and where each one outshines the other.
As comic book aficionados say, with great power comes great responsibility, or great complexity as the case may be. Feature flags provide incredible value, and now with OpenFeature they're more accessible than ever, but the complexity they introduce should not be ignored. As your application grows, it becomes more and more difficult to understand how feature flag evaluations and changes impact your users and their experience with your application. The OpenTelemetry feature observability semantic convention special interest group (SIG) aims to combat this problem by defining a consistent set of rules and definitions for feature telemetry data. Keep reading to learn more about this effort and how you can be involved!