App Configuration is a centralized configuration service with quick feature-flagging capabilities available for use with web and mobile applications, microservices and distributed environments. 

Cloud–native applications are typically made up of numerous loosely coupled components distributed across multiple environments, clouds and data centers. Nimbly and efficiently managing configurations of these distributed components while maintaining access control and governance is a significant challenge for app developers, DevOps engineers and product managers.  

IBM Cloud App Configuration allows you to put all your configuration values in one secure and auditable location on the cloud and use feature flags to change values with the flip of a switch. This greatly reduces the headaches of managing, updating and governing distributed configurations.  

Developers, app owners, and DevOps engineers will benefit from the following capabilities:

• Dark launch features to test in production.
• Roll out feature releases independently of deployments.
• Define rules that customize configurations for segments of users, applications or devices. 
• Update configurations in-flight using toggle switches on a cloud dashboard.
• Use a single dashboard to set configuration values across all your environments.

Use the App Configuration dashboard or API to define feature flags, organize into collections and target segments (groups) of users or resources that you define. Whether your application runs on a mobile device or in the cloud, you can instrument it with App Configuration SDKs and begin using the service. SDKs are currently available for Node.js, Go, Python, Java and Android, with more coming soon. 

Learn more about feature flags:

Features of IBM Cloud App Configuration

• Centralize configurations: Configure multiple, distributed resources from a central location, and use Collections to organize your flags by app or resource. DevOps engineers can easily manage configurations for complex applications and environments from a single dashboard.
• Dark launch: Include features that are not yet ready for general release into your deployments, and activate them when they are ready. Developers can use dark launch to reduce source code branch complexity and troublesome merges by including features behind a feature flag in their master branch. Testers can be confident new features will work in production by testing with feature flags.
• Target features and configurations to segments: Activate features for different segments at different times or vary features by segment. App owners can fine-tune applications to users, and DevOps engineers can have granular control over environment configurations.
• Roll out features apart from deployments: Roll out features and configurations without requiring new code deployments. App owners can efficiently control features without time-consuming pipeline runs and manage features directly from the cloud dashboard:

• Monitor and audit configuration activity: App Configuration sends configuration events to Sysdig and Activity Tracker on IBM Cloud. Development administrators and auditors can easily monitor usage and track configuration change history.  

Get started with IBM Cloud App Configuration

Try App Configuration now on IBM Cloud or read the docs to learn more. If you have any more questions related to App Configuration please reach out to Mike Darden.