Delinea is a Privileged Access Management (PAM) and Identity Security platform that helps enterprises stay secure in a world where cyber security is top of mind. Catering to customers in all segments and industries, including Healthcare, Banking, Insurance, and Government, Delinea is the result of a merger between Centrify and Thycotic.
Dariel is the VP of Cloud Engineering at Delinea where he leads a global team that's responsible for the company's cloud—powering its SaaS offerings, security, and governance.
Delinea moves fast. Not only is it the result of a merger between two leaders in the privileged access management space, but it has continued to make acquisitions to strengthen its product offering. Its newest product, Delinea Platform, was launched in March 2023 and forms a cloud-native foundation for the company’s PAM solutions.
Before Flagsmith, the team was using a homegrown feature flag management tool that didn’t have the capabilities that engineers or PMs needed. The team needed something more robust that could help them strategically and safely roll out and test new features and capabilities.
In preparation for the private preview of Delinea Platform, Dariel and his team began evaluating feature flag platforms, with one desired capability: the ability to self-host. Dariel brought together important advisors on his team, plus stakeholders in Product to do a proof of concept and ensure that Flagsmith was a platform that could work for everyone.
The proof of concept went well and the team chose Flagsmith. One of Dariel’s engineers had this to say about working with Flagsmith’s CTO, “[His] expertise and knowledge of the product is amazing. It’s refreshing to have a discussion and be able to pound out all these points so quickly. Not the experience we had with other vendors.”
As a cloud specialist, Dariel is seeing a shift in companies moving away from vendors that only offer multi-tenancy in their SaaS offering. Vendors need to offer flexibility to meet their customers' challenging demands. This could be for governance, risk, compliance, security, availability, or performance reasons. This is particularly important to Delinea.
“Control and security are of the utmost importance to us. We want to avoid having our footprints scaled beyond our infrastructure as much as possible. With the pure SaaS feature flagging options on the market, there is less control and more risk. The bigger the footprint, the more potential for vulnerabilities or downtime. And so, we try to reduce our footprint as much as possible while also being a SaaS ourselves.”
Delinea is a critical piece of infrastructure for their customers. Today, they have several notable certifications and are working to obtain more. This is a rigorous process where a lot of emphasis is placed on the vendors they work with.
“Having as much control as possible and ensuring things like business continuity, failover, disaster recovery should a system go down… these are all vital. Flagsmith checked a lot of boxes for us. It was self-hostable, it was feature-rich, and it was affordable.”
In addition to this, Dariel notes the improved performance and control that comes with self-hosting.
“We can scale as needed—as much or as little as we want. We can secure it as tightly as we want; and we can failover exactly how, when, and where we want. We’re not beholden to Flagsmith’s operations and potential limitations. We can design and scale accordingly, as long as the application supports the design that fits our needs, which Flagsmith does, with its caching capabilities and proxying capabilities. This allows us to have a much more flexible design in our approach and how we deliver.”
Dariel’s team uses Flagsmith to develop, iterate, and release new features in their cloud-native Delinea Platform product that's being built on Kubernetes. The team also used Flagsmith’s Helm Charts and Terraform provider for the deployment.
Delinea uses PostgresSQL but added a wrapper around Azure Cosmos DB—the PostgresSQL compatible version—for the database backend, which allows them to do things like replication and other advanced capabilities within Cosmos DB.
Delinea’s feature flag use cases are manifold and interesting, but we delved into a few key ones:
Delinea uses feature flags to test, validate, and iterate on new product features and capabilities in their pre-production environment before deploying to production behind flags. Once in production, they make new features available to customers based on different criteria. This has allowed them to optimise new features by gathering real-world feedback before safely rolling them out via gradual releases. The team can be more agile as developers can simply release when they’re ready, rather than needing to wait on a coordinated release. This frees up more room for experimentation and helps them strengthen their product offering.
Features are the backbone of product development and not all customers are the same. Being able to quickly develop new capabilities allows Delinea to be agile and flexible, while also in control of when and how those new features become available. Using a feature flag platform like Flagsmith also empowers non-technical stakeholders, like product owners, to control releases without having to wait on engineers to make changes. This frees up engineering time and prevents bottlenecks for Product.
As Delinea continues to grow, it has made various acquisitions to support its product capabilities. Feature flags have been instrumental in bringing capabilities from the acquired companies into Delinea Platform. Separating deployments from releases has meant that the team can bring in these new capabilities, test, and iterate on them, all without having to worry about impacting customers before they’re ready.
Building a large-scale cybersecurity SaaS software is a complex task. It requires a lot of collaboration and coordination between various teams. This is why Product was a part of the feature flag platform evaluation from the very beginning. Dariel knew the importance of enabling Engineering and Product to work hand-in-hand together. Using a feature flag platform like Flagsmith has empowered non-technical stakeholders, like product owners, to control releases without having to wait on engineers to make changes. This frees up engineering time and prevents bottlenecks.
“The Flagsmith team is great to work with. They are always willing to help and respond to any questions or concerns. I would definitely consider Flagsmith to be more of a partner than a distant vendor.”
Contact us to find out how Flagsmith could work with your releases and teams.
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