March 10, 2023

Announcing the Harness Feature Flags Backstage Plugin: The Developer-Centric View You Need

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Harness has launched a Feature Flags Backstage plugin, enhancing developer efficiency by integrating feature flag management into the Backstage platform. This plugin offers a centralized view of feature flags, facilitating easier management and deployment, while fostering community contributions for continuous improvement.

If you're working on a software project that involves continuous delivery (CD) to do code deployment into a production environment, you're probably familiar with feature flags. They're a powerful tool that allows you to toggle features on and off in your application without deploying new code. With feature flags, you can release new features to your chosen users – whether that’s a small segment or all users –  and gradually increase the rollout as track how the feature performs. However, feature flag management across a large-scale application can be a complex task, which is where Harness Feature Flags comes in. With the new Harness Feature Flags Backstage plugin, developers can have a more focused view of feature flags from within the Backstage platform.

Harness Feature Flags UI

About Harness Feature Flags

Harness Feature Flags is a feature management platform that helps teams create and manage feature flags across their applications. With Harness, you can manage feature flags for different applications, environments, and releases, as well as set up targeting rules for specific user segments. 

However, when it comes to a large-scale project, managing feature flags can be a daunting task, especially when different teams and stakeholders are involved. This is where the Harness Feature Flags Backstage plugin comes in, making it easier for developers to seamlessly navigate through the environments and get required information on the feature flags in use, directly on their backstage instance. 

The new Harness Feature Flags Backstage plugin integrates with Backstage, the open-source platform for building developer portals. It provides a developer-centric view of the flags that have been set up in the Harness Feature Flags module, allowing developers to easily manage what they need for their specific tasks. With the plugin, developers can see a list of all the feature flags for the application they are working on, as well as their descriptions, targeting rules, and release status. 

Backstage UI

Using Harness Feature Flags

To start implementing feature flags in your code using Harness, you can sign up for free. The Harness Feature Flags Backstage plugin is an open source project available on GitHub, which means that developers can contribute to the plugin's development by submitting pull requests, reporting bugs, and suggesting new features or enhancements. This allows the plugin to continuously evolve and improve based on the feedback and contributions of the developer community.

Custom Integrations

Since developers are able to contribute to the development of the plugin, they can also create personalized integrations for their own specific use cases. This allows developers to tailor the plugin to their specific needs, which can make their work more efficient and effective.

Harness Open Source

By contributing to the Harness Feature Flags Backstage plugin, developers can also become part of a vibrant community of developers who are working on similar projects, feel free to ask questions at community forum or join community slack to chat with our engineers. 

Check Out Feature Flags Today

The new Backstage plugin is a powerful tool for developers who are working with Harness Feature Flags. It provides a developer-centric view of the feature flags that have been set up for the application they are working on, as well as an easy way to manage and test those flags. By integrating with Backstage, developers can access this functionality from within the platform they are already using, which can save them time and effort. If you're working with Harness Feature Flags, the Backstage plugin is definitely worth checking out!

To get started using Harness Feature Flags, you can sign up for free forever and start implementing feature flags in your applications today.

Feature Management & Experimentation