Octopus Feature Flags: targeting rules, automated rollouts and general availability

Octopus Deploy has published its roadmap for Octopus Feature Flags, the feature flag system it launched in Public Preview in July. According to the article, teams have since used them to turn features on and off without redeploying, to release changes to a subset of tenants or users, and to keep unfinished work hidden on the main branch. The announcements fall under three headings: a redesigned experience with rule-based configuration, automated rollouts and general availability (GA).

Rule-based configuration. Until now, each flag was configured through a per-environment form: which tenants to include or exclude, a rollout percentage, a minimum version, and so on. According to Octopus, as capabilities were added it became hard to understand how the fields interacted, and the relationship between them was fixed, so scenarios that didn't fit were left without a solution. The form is being replaced by rules: each environment has zero or more rules, and each rule has one or more conditions. A rule matches when all its conditions are met, and the flag is enabled when any rule matches.

The available conditions are: tenant is or is not one of a list; tenant has or does not have a tag; context attribute is or is not one of a list of values (for example email, region or license type, based on the OpenFeature evaluation context passed by the application); minimum version, so the rule only matches once that version has reached the environment, since Octopus knows what is deployed where; percentage of tenants, for a progressive rollout by tenant; and percentage based on the targeting key, for a progressive rollout across users. The article's example: release to all tenants tagged beta, plus 10% of the rest, except one customer that asked to be excluded. Rules come with a redesigned flag page, where the Rollout, Evaluate and Details tabs sit together and the rule builder appears when an environment is expanded.

Existing flags. Projects with existing flags will see an option to upgrade them all. Anything that can be expressed with the current form can be expressed with rules, so the upgrade will not change behavior. Beforehand, client SDKs need to be on a compatible version: .NET 4.x, Java 2.x and JavaScript 5.x. The new versions are backward compatible, so they can be upgraded at any time.

Automated rollouts. Octopus already supported progressive rollouts, but automation depended on people: someone had to decide when to move to the next group and remember to widen the rollout, with the plan in someone's head or on a wiki. With automated rollouts, the plan lives with the flag. A rollout is a sequence of phases; each phase groups one or more rules, and activating it publishes its rules. The article compares this to Octopus lifecycles: there, phases are ordered groups of environments; here, they are ordered groups of rules.

The proposed example has four phases: Staff (users with the license-type attribute equal to staff), Alpha users (rollout-ring equal to alpha), 10% of all users plus the alpha users from the previous phases, and Everyone. Phases can be activated manually or via triggers, which activate them at a specific date and time or a fixed amount of time after the previous phase. Manual and automatic phases can be mixed. In the example, Staff and Alpha are activated by hand, the 10% phase is scheduled for November 1 and the all-users phase one day later. Once underway, Octopus completes the rollout without further intervention, but the team stays in control: it can switch the flag off instantly or halt progress by removing the next phase's trigger. The new list page shows at a glance the active phase, what is scheduled next and how far each feature has progressed toward full release.

General availability and self-hosted version. Feature Flags is leaving Public Preview. For Octopus Cloud customers, they are now available on all instances and the Preview label is being dropped. For those who had requested it, they will come to Octopus Server (self-hosted) in version 2027.0. Rules and automated rollouts are rolling out to Octopus Cloud right now, and the company notes it is doing so using Octopus Feature Flags.

Octopus stresses that flags are available on all license tiers, including the free one, and that they are built on OpenFeature, making them easy to try alongside an in-house or commercial flag tool and, since switching OpenFeature providers is trivial, there would be no vendor lock-in. It is worth noting that this is a promotional article from the vendor itself and includes no adoption metrics or independent assessments.