Moirai

Moirai (or: the Fates) controls people's destiny. Moirai is a feature-flag and resource-reloading library for the JVM (requires Java 8 or above).

This project provides libraries that can be used to determine if a feature should be exposed to a user. This feature-flagging can be used for alpha or beta testing, load control, gradual rollout, A/B testing, etc.

It consists of support for reloading a configuration resource periodically in the background, and pluggable interfaces for how resources are loaded, what their content is, and how the configuration is used to decide if a feature is enabled for a user. Modules are then provided for reusable implementations of these components.

The resource reloading can be used independently of the feature-flagging as a light-weight configuration reloading library.

Usage

The provided example is in Java, but Moirai should be easy to use in any JVM language.

Creates a FeatureFlagChecker that reloads a Typesafe config file that controls whether getNumber returns a hard-coded number or calls calculateRealNumber:

import com.nike.moirai.ConfigFeatureFlagChecker;
import com.nike.moirai.FeatureCheckInput;
import com.nike.moirai.FeatureFlagChecker;
import com.nike.moirai.Suppliers;
import com.nike.moirai.resource.FileResourceLoaders;
import com.nike.moirai.resource.reload.ResourceReloader;
import com.nike.moirai.typesafeconfig.TypesafeConfigDecider;
import com.nike.moirai.typesafeconfig.TypesafeConfigReader;
import com.typesafe.config.Config;

import java.io.File;
import java.util.function.Supplier;

import static com.nike.moirai.Suppliers.supplierAndThen;

public class Usage {
    Supplier<String> fileSupplier = FileResourceLoaders.forFile(new File("/path/to/conf/file/moirai.conf"));
    Supplier<Config> configSupplier = supplierAndThen(fileSupplier, TypesafeConfigReader.FROM_STRING);

    ResourceReloader<Config> resourceReloader = ResourceReloader.withDefaultSettings(
        Suppliers.async(configSupplier),
        configSupplier.get()
    );

    FeatureFlagChecker featureFlagChecker = ConfigFeatureFlagChecker.forReloadableResource(
        resourceReloader,
        TypesafeConfigDecider.ENABLED_USERS.or(TypesafeConfigDecider.PROPORTION_OF_USERS)
    );
    
    public int getNumber(String userIdentity) {
        if (featureFlagChecker.isFeatureEnabled("random.calculatenumber", FeatureCheckInput.forUser(userIdentity))) {
            return calculateRealNumber();
        } else {
            return 42;
        }
    }
    
    public int calculateRealNumber() {
        // calculate a value
        ...
    }
}

Example config file:

moirai {
  random.calculatenumber {
    enabledUserIds = [
      8675309
      1234
    ]
   enabledProportion = 0.01
  }
}

Modules

• moirai-core provides base functionality and abstractions with no additional dependencies beyond the JDK
• moirai-s3 provides a convenient Supplier for loading a text file from Amazon S3
• moirai-typesafeconfig provides both a utility to read a String as a Typesafe Config and Predicate implementations based on a convention for representing feature-flag settings as a Config.
• moirai-riposte-example provides an example of how one would go about using riposte to use the moirai's ConfigFeatureFlagChecker

Components

ResourceReloader

The ResourceReloader takes an arbitrary Supplier of some value, and periodically calls the Supplier and stores the resulting value. It's essentially a cache of one value that is periodically updated asynchronously. Any data type and data source can be used by providing the Supplier.

You can have as much or as little transformation of the raw resource data cached as you want by chaining behavior onto provided Supplier.

Suppliers

There are utilities in Suppliers for transforming both synchronous and asynchronous Supplier instances. Additional modules can provide a Supplier for loading data from some location (such an object in S3). FileResourceLoaders provides instances for reading from the file system or the classpath. Modules can also provide functions to be used with the Suppliers for reading raw data into a useful format (such as Typesafe Config).

FeatureFlagChecker

FeatureFlagChecker is a very simple interface that takes in a feature-identifier and a FeatureCheckInput and returns a boolean if the feature should be enabled given that input.

The FeatureCheckInput represents any data that might be used to make a feature-check decision. It has built-in support for a userId and a dateTime, and also allows custom dimensions to be added to fit whatever input decision criteria you need.

Config

Two methods of support for making a feature flag decision based on the userId input are provided: WhitelistedUsersConfigDecider and ProportionOfUsersConfigDecider. These are generic abstractions that modules (such as moirai-typesafeconfig) can provide concrete implementations of for specific config formats. The abstraction for these "deciders" is a Predicate, which allows you to combine them using and or or to flexibly define your own rules for feature checking.

• WhitelistedUsersConfigDecider takes a concrete list of user identifiers from some config source and checks if it contains the input user
• ProportionOfUsersConfigDecider uses the hashCode of the input userId against a ratio provided by some config source. For example, if the config source provides a value of 0.9 for the feature identifier, then approximately 90% of the users will get the feature enabled from this decider.

Another method for making a feature flag decision based on a boolean value in the configuration: FeatureEnabledConfigDecider. This decider does not take any input.

ConfigFeatureFlagChecker

ConfigFeatureFlagChecker is where you put it all together. Given either a ResourceReloader or just a Supplier and a corresponding Predicate, it provides a FeatureFlagChecker.

While the example from the Usage section demonstrates the intended common pattern for combining these components together, Moirai is designed to be flexible and composable. So you can build your ResourceReloader/Supplier and your Predicate however you want, including with custom implementations, or you can even implement FeatureFlagChecker directly if desired.

License

Moirai is released under the Apache License, Version 2.0