Feature Flagging your Infrastructure for Fun and Profit
Abstract
At Etsy we run our production stack exclusively on physical hardware and have (including developer and CI VMs) about 1000 nodes managed with a single Chef server running the same cookbooks across development and production nodes. We have built the knife-spork plugin to support our workflow and have 30 engineers making changes about 20 times a day. While this setup keeps configuration changes and package installations consistent across our network, it makes it harder to gradually roll out and test changes on a per node or role basis. In the talk our general workflow will be introduced and explained and how we enable engineers to frequently roll out small changes. Following the general introduction, our workflow for testing changes will be discussed and the library we wrote to enable config flags and gradual roll outs for our infrastructure within our chef recipes.