Kill switches are a type of feature flag that allows you to shut off features in your application quickly. They are useful for:
- Emergency shutoffs of external APIs and services.
- Responding to unexpected spam or traffic spikes.
- Other operational incidents where you need to quickly put the brakes on without causing additional disruption.
In this tutorial, you will learn to add a kill switch to a Spring Boot application, using the LaunchDarkly Java SDK. This example will utilize the Motivational Messages API as a data source here since it’s free, doesn’t require authentication, and gives us the message we might need to read today.