A toggle is a switch that can be pressed or clicked to move between different states or options. It’s commonly used in everyday technology devices and applications like computers and mobile phones to enable or disable features. In software, toggles are often deployed as part of a canary release or feature flag system.

When implementing feature toggles it is important to be intentional about the scope of each toggle. It’s tempting to create large swaths of code under the control of one toggle, but doing so can be confusing for other teams and a nightmare to debug weeks or months down the road. Additionally, it’s a good idea to name your toggles with meaningful names. This can help anyone on your team understand what the toggle is doing at a glance when it appears in an error message or in source control.

It is also helpful to consider the impact a toggle has on runtime performance when creating and configuring them. For example, if your toggles are dynamic and are based on database queries then each time a toggle is activated or deactivated it will require a database query which can add up to thousands or even millions of database calls over the lifetime of the release. It’s therefore a good idea to optimize your toggles database for read performance before deploying them to production.

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