Case Study: Eliminating Bottlenecks While Scaling Development with Feature Management

Wayfair required a feature management solution to address the growing complexity of their deployment processes. As they scaled, the engineering hours spent testing and certifying features increased, creating a bottleneck. They needed a system that allowed for incremental work and more efficient feature rollouts without compromising the customer experience.

About Wayfair

Wayfair is a leading e-commerce platform specializing in home goods, offering a vast range of products through various brands to meet the diverse needs of its 22 million customers. The company prides itself on creating an exceptional shopping and fulfillment experience for everything home-related.

Problems with Wayfair’s Homegrown Feature Flag Solution

Wayfair initially developed an in-house feature flag system, which provided some benefits but quickly became problematic due to:

• Rapid User Growth: The system faced scalability issues as more internal developers adopted it.
• Unregulated Access: Lack of policies led to confusion and mistakes, as any team could create or change toggles without oversight.
• Maintenance Overhead: Frequent updates and patches were required to keep up with user demands, causing significant downtime and delays in feature propagation.
• Visibility Issues: Difficulty in tracking changes and identifying the cause of issues hindered troubleshooting efforts.
• Scalability Concerns: Supporting multiple languages and microservices required additional middleware and maintenance efforts.

The Benefits of Unleash Feature Management

Unleash provided Wayfair with a robust feature management solution that addressed the limitations of their homegrown system:

• Scalability and Performance: Unleash’s out-of-the-box scalability and high performance met Wayfair’s growing demands without additional maintenance overhead. On a typical busy day, usage peaks at over 20,000 requests per second, which Unleash handles with ease.
• Granular Control: Advanced activation strategies and constraints allowed for more precise control over feature rollouts, improving the ability to manage incremental deployments.
• Comprehensive SDKs: Unleash offered server-side and client-side SDKs for various languages, reducing the burden of maintaining middleware and ensuring compatibility across Wayfair’s tech stack.
• Improved Governance: Features like flag types, tags, and user roles provided better visibility and control, helping manage technical debt and ensuring responsible use of feature flags.
• Enhanced Resiliency: Unleash’s Edge deployment brought state checking closer to the compute resources, ensuring high availability and fast recovery times.

The Business Outcomes of Unleash

The adoption of Unleash led to significant business outcomes for Wayfair:

• Increased Deployment Frequency: Wayfair’s ability to deploy features more frequently without extensive testing cycles accelerated their development process.
• Reduced Downtime: The transition to Unleash minimized maintenance-related downtimes and ensured faster feature propagation.
• Cost Efficiency: Unleash proved to be one-third the cost of Wayfair’s homegrown system, saving the company millions of dollars per year.
• Enhanced Developer Productivity: With thousands of developers using Unleash, they could focus more on building features rather than maintaining the feature flag system, leading to higher productivity and innovation.
• Better Risk Management: The improved control and visibility over feature flags helped mitigate risks associated with feature rollouts, ensuring a stable and reliable user experience.

Conclusion

Wayfair’s move to Unleash for feature management has been a strategic decision that not only improved their deployment processes and scalability but also enhanced overall business performance. By leveraging Unleash’s robust and scalable solution, Wayfair was able to innovate faster, manage risks better, and significantly reduce operational costs.