Open Feature: Beyond Swapping Feature Flag Providers

Originally prepared for FOSDEM, but also shared in the NTA community.

The feature flag ecosystem has matured into many competing platforms and SDKs—and now includes the OpenFeature specification.

The trap: feature flags quickly become provider-specific custom logic instead of reusable hooks/extensions.

This talk has three parts:

• What are feature flags
• What is OpenFeature
• 2 examples of advanced use cases: OpenFeature SDK extension points (e.g., for user privacy tiers, dynamic test environments)

So, What Are Feature Toggles?

You hit deploy—and your checkout is down.

• In web systems, we ship code with features off by default and enable them via cookies, percentage rollouts, or lightweight A/B tests.

• In offline or embedded systems, the same idea appears as debug modes, experimental features, or configuration-driven behavior switches.

Different environments, same core idea: deploy now, decide later.