Upon deploying a new version of your product into production, it’s usually handy to enable the new functionalities only to a subset of users. This allows to measure the impact of your code changes in a controlled way:

• Does the new functionality have an unexpected impact in server performance that was not detected in stress testing lab?
• Is the new functionality increasing session duration, global product usage, customer satisfaction, etc?
• Whas is the impact on the client side? Is it creating a battery drain or any other unexpected issue?

Feature toggling can be handy as well to reduce the impact of dependencies among components. If a new functionality in component A requires a new version of component B, the new functionality in component A can be toggle off till the new B version reaches production, then the deployment pipeline is loosely coupled.

Over my last Christmas holidays I spent some time visiting Vietnam, and back then I read about rollout gem, a ruby library that implements feature toggling using Redis as backend. proclaim python port is kind of outdated so I decided to build another python port, that has been named as hanoi.

Hanoi can be used for the following scenarios:

1. Enable/disable globally a functionality (toggle on/off)
2. Enable a functionality to a percentage of users, increasing the percentage gradually to ensure server and client behaviour.
3. Enable a functionality to specific users (whitelist users)

Currently three BackEnd are implemented (a memory based backend and REDIS backend in two different flavors). My expectation is to include additional BackEnds in the future to support additional storages, such as memcached and mongoDB.

For additional information about hanoi check the documentation in the github repository.

Happy deploying!

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