GitHub - anoop-b/FlagShip: An edge-first feature flag application

FlagShip

An edge-first Feature Flag Management application [WIP].

A Scalable Feature Flag service you run yourself on Cloudflare.

Architecture

FlagShip is fully serverless and is hosted on cloudflare workers platform. It uses D1 for storing application data and syncs flags specific to each project to a configurable destination.

At the moment, only Cloudflare KV is supported as the sync destination.

Pre-Requisites:

Working cloudflare account
Setup D1 and KV on cloudflare account, Either through CLI or through dashboard
Setup Cloudflare Zero trust access for the application domain (this is to delegate the auth functionality to cloudflare)
Setup the following env variables in a .env file in the root of the project:

CLOUDFLARE_POLICY_AUD="6504a7a77b829804b0b8ac8538bb57874ac361ffc27d5ef37f069e4b3d39869b"
CLOUDFLARE_TEAM_DOMAIN="https://example.cloudflareaccess.com"
PUBLIC_CLOUDFLARE_TEAM_DOMAIN="example.cloudflareaccess.com"
CLOUDFLARE_D1_TOKEN="UomOTLEvczkP6fcC17C9LJajXB_xD9VrhfbrnXab"
CLOUDFLARE_D1_ID="0e0abed4-b08b-4298-8e13-85d127c2f799"
CLOUDFLARE_ACCOUNT_ID="1cab5655572c1f2e586fd8261228c4c0"
CLOUDFLARE_KV_API_TOKEN="CxbfPWE5tUa48UoE3DVAN_Oz7Lv8pwwuh9Lkiwmo"
CLOUDFLARE_KV_NAMESPACE_ID="5c21b61cab2740e480cde15f62984056"

All of the above variables can be found on the cloudflare workers dashboard.

Developing

Once you've created a project and installed dependencies with npm install (or pnpm install or yarn or bun), start a development server:

npm run dev

# or start the server and open the app in a new browser tab
npm run dev -- --open

Building

To create a production version of your app:

You can preview the production build with npm run preview.

Notes

Application Screenshot

Motivation

This project was created as part my Master's Thesis. The initial idea was to evaluate the feasibility of running a stateful workload on the edge using commertially available tools and services and compare it againt traditional non serverless (and non edge based) workloads.

I also did notice that Cloudflare doesn't have an offering for Feature Flag management as part of its product suite.

On further digging, I found some more interesting advantages of running a Feature flag service at the edge. Apart from the obvious advantage of reduced latency, it can also be combined with server-side rendering to provide a more efficient and faster experience to the end user.