Ship with safety
Wrap every risky change in a flag before you merge it. Default new flags to off, then light them up in pre-prod synthetics and dark launches that mirror production traffic and device mix.
Define success metrics per flag—latency, error budget burn, adoption—and display them next to the toggle so approvers can see health before expanding exposure.
Expose flags to on-call and product duty officers in a single console. They should be able to disable features without waiting for deploys or ticket approvals.
Automate responses
Tie Watch.Dog alerts to flag toggles for immediate mitigation: if a synthetic fails or error budget burns too fast, roll exposure back or kill the feature automatically.
Use percentage rollouts to spot regressions before they hit everyone. Start with 1–5% traffic on low-risk cohorts, then gate further expansion on metrics staying green for a fixed window.
Log every toggle with who flipped it and why. That audit trail becomes your incident timeline and keeps shadow changes out of production.
Automations to wire
- Auto-rollback when error budget burn exceeds a threshold
- Slack or PagerDuty notifications on risky flag changes
- Freeze toggles during incident response unless approved by on-call
Audit and retire
Assign an owner and an expiry date to every flag. On expiry, either delete the flag or document why it stays as a kill switch with the latest test results.
Review long-lived flags for security and performance implications. Stale dead-code paths can bypass auth or add latency even when the flag looks "off."
Include flag hygiene in your on-call weekly review so uptime controls stay trusted and fast to operate.
Drill your kill switches
Quarterly, pick a critical feature and practice flipping it off while measuring customer impact. Capture how long dashboards take to reflect the change and whether caches retain stale UI states.
Add a flag-only chaos day: trigger synthetic alerts, watch automations roll exposure back, and verify that communications and status pages match reality.