by felgueres on 9/23/22, 11:42 PM with 0 comments
At my last team I spent a lot of time managing config files. We had configs to do things like turning on/off training ML models or dynamic feature flags that helped us test new features in real-world settings.
I noticed a few things: * Often these configs were pointing to the same information and over time they would drift which caused inconsistencies in the system. * Internal tools had different interfaces to create configs and they would be instrumented differently. For example, some had version control and permissions while others were simple YAMLs. * There was significant time lost waiting to stamp, land and redeploy low risk config changes.
So I had this idea, what if there was an API to easily create and manage configs with a consistent and well instrumented interface?
So far these are the main features: * Create JSON formatted configs and access them with an api call. * Dynamic retrieval. In the request body, users can pass context variables which the tool will evaluate against user defined rules and return a value. For example, give me X config given I am user Y. * A dashboard to monitor config usage.
Potential use cases: * Feature flags: On/Off * Feature flags with context: eg. turn flag on for users in X city. * General purpose configuration store with access from anywhere.
I'll be happy to receive your feedback!