Kill switches
Flags can be used to instantly turn off features or services that are on by default, often as a contingency plan.
SaaS outages are a great example. If a Saas provider's functionality is gated with a killswitch in your code and the provider suffers an outage, you can immediately turn on the killswitch and gracefully degrade your experience instead of hard erroring.
Create a kill switch
Give the killswitch a descriptive name and key. The switch only needs one variation to determine if it's on. Below we've named that variation on
:
After creation, the switch can be embedded in your code as is, with the default status being off. Since the switch is all or nothing, no allocation is required:
Use the kill switch in your code
Here's how you would use the switch in your code:
# The argument user_id is required but doesn't affect assignment in this case.
if (eppoClient.getAssignment(user_id, 'twilio-killswitch') == 'on'):
# Code to gracefully handle a Twilio outage.
else:
# Normal Twilio code.