Downtime protection and improved latency with Local Evaluation

We’ve added local evaluation to Bucket to improve latency and provide downtime protection. Our Node.js SDK now supports local evaluation, which is perfect if you have a high volume of feature flags or are worried about intermittent downtime.

Generally, our SDKs send your user/company attributes to our servers and return a list of features that should be enabled. Since we operate a global network, we keep the initial evaluation round-trip time low.

However, if you’re concerned about potential downtime, you can evaluate features locally on your servers instead of sending a request to our servers. Our SDKs will download the targeting rules from our servers and run checks against the rules using the given user and company properties locally instead of contacting our servers for every evaluation. 

The SDKs will periodically refresh the targeting rules to make sure any changes you make to targeting are in effect quickly.

Happy shipping!