// wiki / high-availability

High availability

A feature flag check runs on every request. If that check can bring your application down, you've added a new way to fail — not just a new way to launch.

Three ways this can go wrong

"High availability" isn't one property — it's three separate failure modes, each handled differently:

  • Your app can't reach Maxlona at all — a network blip, a DNS hiccup, a brief regional outage.
  • Maxlona is up but slow, or a piece of it is degraded — a traffic spike, a backend hiccup.
  • Something downstream of evaluation has trouble — a webhook endpoint is down, a streaming connection drops.

Each one has a specific answer, not just "we have redundant servers."

How each one is handled

The one decision that's still yours

None of the above matters if your code doesn't have a sensible answer for "what happens if this call fails anyway." That's not a Maxlona setting — it's a design decision you make when you wire a flag into your code: what should the checkout page do if the flag lookup times out? For most features, the safe default is off, so a lookup failure quietly falls back to existing behavior instead of surfacing a broken new one. Decide it deliberately, once, rather than discovering the answer during an actual incident.