Self-host your feature toggle system
Feature toggle systems seem like the obvious choice for a software-as-a-service? It is not always the better choice – as always, it depends on your context. Unleash is the flexible feature toggle system. Software-as-a-service or self-hosted – it is your choice. These are some of the reasons to help you decide whether to self-host your feature toggle system or not.
Unleash self-hosted |
Unleash as a service |
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What are the advantages of going self-host your feature toggle system?
Security
- The Unleash server runs within your own private data center; hence, no external service can access your critical infrastructure.
- The use of feature toggles on a SaaS platform may also give away some clues to the internal design of your application (which presents a security risk in itself).
Privacy
To support the delivery of features using feature toggles, such as segmentation and/or gradual rollout, the system must have access to sensitive user data. For example, to make it easy to address groups of users or even specific users, this data is synced back to the feature toggle server. If the server runs in the cloud, this means privacy data is shared outside your control.
With Unleash Enterprise self-hosted, all data always stays within your network.
GDPR/data protection
For some industries, there are legitimate GDPR and privacy concerns regarding the use of cloud-based services.
Reliability
Crucial for some high-availability scenarios, where you cannot risk a third party affecting your service.
Flexibility
By going self-hosted, your organization can set up the integrations and workflows that meet your needs. Unleash’s architecture is particularly strong here. Unleash is designed with an “API first strategy“. Further, everything in Unleash is an event. Most of these events are available through the APIs. This makes it easy to integrate Unleash into the use case that makes sense for you.
Cost
SaaS pricing usually scales upwards with increased usage and volume. Costs may initially be limited but as use increases, both the price and management of the cloud-based system’s monthly active users (MAU) can become significant. In fact, research indicates that a third of cloud services spending is wasted.