Hands-Off Features Releases With Keptn, OpenFeature, And OpenTelemetry

Captain is an orchestration layer that separates tooling from the process to simplify complex automation pipelines. OpenFeature enables standardization and vendor-agnostic feature flagging.

• Captain is an application lifecycle orchestrator that separates the process from the underlying tooling to simplify complex automation pipelines
• Captain reduces automation code by 90% and comes with SRE best practices like SLO validations built-in
• OpenFeature enables standardization and vendor-agnostic feature flagging
• Both Captain and OpenFeature have active communities and can be accessed through QR codes or their respective websites

Christian, a senior IT professional, had to deal with 2800 projects and 1000 pipelines, which were difficult to maintain due to the heavy and complicated tooling baked into them. Captain solved this problem by introducing an eventing layer that allows the process to be separated from the underlying tooling. With a well-defined process, teams can share it across the organization and use different tools to execute it. OpenFeature enables standardization and vendor-agnostic feature flagging, making it easy to take advantage of powerful concepts in a safe way that works across vendors and homemade solutions.

Releasing a new feature into production always comes with an inherent risk of introducing issues. The code may have been thoroughly tested in lower environments but differences like environment specific configurations can cause unexpected behaviour. Feature flagging helps reduce this risk by allowing a subset of users to verify a new feature in production before exposing it to all. But how can we achieve hands-off feature release automation? This session will demonstrate how feature flagging and life-cycle orchestration work together to automate feature releases. Keptn will be the orchestration layer to automate feature validation. It works with OpenFeature to control access to the feature itself, allowing automated tests to verify a feature before it's generally available to users. Keptn will then react on the test results by either progressively enabling the feature for all users or initiating a troubleshooting workflow using OpenTelemetry.