Mark Quigley- Leveraging Unleash to Drive Risk Reduction and Enhance Dev Productivity at Wayfair

In this insightful talk from UnleashCon, Mark Quigley, Engineering Leader at Wayfair, discusses how implementing Unleash has significantly reduced risks and enhanced development productivity within the company for a 1/3 of the cost of running their own feature management solution. Wayfair, a global e-commerce leader specializing in home goods, faced challenges with their in-house feature toggle system, including scalability issues, maintenance overhead, and lack of proper access controls.
What You'll Learn:
Wayfair's Initial Challenges with Feature Management:
Limitations of their homegrown feature toggle system.
Issues with scalability, maintenance, and lack of policies.
Difficulties in onboarding new users and supporting multiple programming languages.
The Decision to Switch to Unleash:
How Unleash addressed Wayfair's needs for scalability and resilience.
Availability of server-side and client-side SDKs for various programming languages.
Ability to implement custom activation strategies and constraints.
Implementation Strategies:
Deploying Unleash Server in regional clusters with a central database.
Introducing Unleash Edge to improve performance and scalability.
Architectural changes that limited the blast radius in case of failures.
Benefits Achieved:
Significant reduction in maintenance overhead and support burden.
Improved feature propagation speed and reduced latency.
Enhanced access control and auditability of feature toggles.
Achieving sub-linear scaling and cost efficiency.
Impact on Development Productivity:
Enabling over 400 projects to rely on Unleash for feature deployment.
Managing over 3,500 feature flags with 2,200 actively used.
Positive feedback from engineers and high adoption rates across teams.
About the Speaker:
Mark Quigley is an Engineering Leader at Wayfair, overseeing engineering effectiveness globally. With a passion for development and innovation, he focuses on improving productivity and reducing risks within engineering teams. Based in Boston, Mark is also a dad and a gamer.
About Wayfair:
Wayfair is a global e-commerce company specializing in home goods. With multiple brands targeting different market segments, Wayfair offers a vast selection of furniture, décor, and more to help customers create their dream homes.