Case Study: Cognite achieves instant Rust feature-flagging and faster, safer deployments with Unleash

How Cognite built Unleash’s Rust SDK in a few days, with immediate results

Cognite, a leader in industrial software and maker of Cognite Data Fusion®, needed a way to use feature flags in Rust across performance‑sensitive applications like its Reveal 3D viewer and a JVM-to-Rust rewrite by the Seismic team. Although Cognite was already an open source user of Unleash for backend services, Unleash did not yet have an official Rust SDK to support these Rust-based projects, leaving teams without the affordances (feature flags, tracing) they required for safe rollout and experimentation.

Senior Principal Architect Robert Collins quickly implemented a Rust client that matched Unleash’s API, open-sourced it, and within a year the library became an official Unleash SDK. The result was immediate: Cognite teams could link to Unleash feature flags in Rust with extremely low evaluation overhead (measured in nanoseconds), enabling safer experiments, incremental and progressive delivery, and faster deployments. The SDK was written in days, adopted across multiple teams, and is maintained in collaboration with the Unleash community, driving broader company adoption of Unleash.

Cognite

Robert Collins

Senior Principal Architect