Toggle is a digital trade journal that highlights the vital role that technology plays in companies and organizations of all sizes and the people who manage them. From security and data privacy to cloud solutions and emerging applications like artificial intelligence and machine learning, Toggle covers a wide range of topics that are important to today’s CIOs and CTOs.

In software, toggle refers to a switch that can have two positions, on or off. They are commonly used in options menus to allow users to configure application settings and can also be found on hardware devices such as keyboards to enable or disable functions.

For example, a toggle can be used to switch between light and dark themes in an application. This provides users with the ability to personalize their experience and cater for their own preferences. It is important to consider the impact of a toggle in this context and ensure that it is implemented in a way that will not negatively affect user experience or performance.

Another popular use case for toggles is to perform A/B testing. By enabling and disabling features on a cohort-by-cohort basis, engineering teams can measure the performance of different codepaths without having to deploy the changes to the entire user base.

While it’s possible to create toggles directly in the source code, most companies choose to store their toggle configuration in some type of centralized location (often an existing application DB). This allows system operators, testers and product managers to view and modify their Features Flags and their configuration through an admin UI. This approach is often accompanied by the build-out of some form of admin API to support scale and consistent deployments across a fleet of servers.