Software Design

Managing Feature Flag Staged Rollout States

State Diagrams · made in Skemio

State diagram showing feature flag lifecycle: Off, Canary, Percentage Ramp, Fully Active, Deprecated, and Cleaned Up.
State diagram showing feature flag lifecycle: Off, Canary, Percentage Ramp, Fully Active, Deprecated, and Cleaned Up.
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What it shows

  • Canary releases isolate unexpected errors to internal staff first.
  • Percentage rollouts (1% to 100%) catch subtle database query spikes.
  • Flags must reach Deprecated and Cleaned Up states or tech debt explodes.

The takeaway

A feature flag lifecycle is not complete until the flag toggle is deleted from code.

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