Hi all,

My company develops CDN / Web-Hosting solution. We have a middleware that's served as a business logic layer and exposes web service for the front-end.

I would like to seek for a clean solution to feature management - there're uncertainties and ugly workarounds/solutions in the software that the dev would say "when it happens or is broken, we will fix it".

For example, here're the following features that a web publisher can have:

• Sites limit
• Bandwidth limit
• SSL feature + SSL configuration per site

If we downgrade a web publisher, when he's having 10 sites, down to 5 sites, we can choose not to suspend the rest of the 5 sites, or we shall prompt for suspension before the downgrade.

For the case of bandwidth limit, the downgrade is easy, when the bandwidth check happens, if the publisher has it exceeded, then we will suspend his account.

For the case of SSL feature. Every SSL configuration is tied to a site, what shall happen to these configuration object when the SSL feature is downgraded from enabled to disabled?

So as you can see, there're many different situations and there are different ways of handling it.

• I can make a system that examines the impacts and prompts the user to make changes before the downgrade/upgrade.
• Or a system that ignores the impacts and just upgrade/downgrade. Bad.
• Or a system designed in a way that the client code need to be aware of the complex feature matrix (or I can expose a helper to the client code to check if a feature is not DEFUNCT)

There can be many ways that I am still thinking but puzzled. I am wondering, how would you tackle this issue and is there any recommended patterns or books or software that you think I can refer to?

Appreciate your help.