Feature Flags Suck! - The Problems With Feature Flagging and How To Avoid Them - Pete Hodgson, PH1

Don't miss out! Join us at our next Flagship Conference: KubeCon + CloudNativeCon events in Amsterdam, The Netherlands (23-26 March, 2026). Connect with our current graduated, incubating, and sandbox projects as the community gathers to further the education and advancement of cloud native computing. Learn more at https://kubecon.io Feature Flags Suck! - The Problems With Feature Flagging and How To Avoid Them - Pete Hodgson, PH1 OK, feature flags are actually pretty awesome, but if you use them wrong you could certainly be forgiven for thinking they suck. After helping many teams along their flag adoption journey, some common pitfalls become clear. In this talk we'll avoid the pain and suffering by hearing some horror stories which illustrate the most common problems that teams run into and how to avoid them. • Learn about the most common mistake - too many flags! • Marvel at 3 neat tricks to keep the number of flags in check! • Commiserate with the many organizations who roll their own feature flagging solution, then learn how CNCF's OpenFeature project can save them! • See how to track flag usage and impact using Open Telemetry!