Dark Launches and Feature Flags

1. Deploying and Releasing Are Different Events

The single idea underneath this lesson is a separation that most systems do not make by default.

Deploying puts code on servers. Releasing makes it take effect. A flag is what holds those two apart.

When they are the same event, every deploy is a release, which means every deploy carries risk proportional to everything in it, and the only way to undo anything is to undo all of it. That is why teams deploy less often, which makes each deploy larger, which makes it riskier