Book Image

Feature Management with LaunchDarkly

By : Michael Gillett
Book Image

Feature Management with LaunchDarkly

By: Michael Gillett

Overview of this book

Over the past few years, DevOps has become the de facto approach for designing, building, and delivering software. Feature management is now extending the DevOps methodology to allow applications to change on demand and run experiments to validate the success of new features. If you want to make feature management happen, LaunchDarkly is the tool for you. This book explains how feature management is key to building modern software systems. Starting with the basics of LaunchDarkly and configuring simple feature flags to turn features on and off, you'll learn how simple functionality can be applied in more powerful ways with percentage-based rollouts, experimentation, and switches. You'll see how feature management can change the way teams work and how large projects, including migrations, are planned. Finally, you'll discover various uses of every part of the tool to gain mastery of LaunchDarkly. This includes tips and tricks for experimentation, identifying groups and segments of users, and investigating and debugging issues with specific users and feature flag evaluations. By the end of the book, you'll have gained a comprehensive understanding of LaunchDarkly, along with knowledge of the adoption of trunk-based development workflows and methods, multi-variant testing, and managing infrastructure changes and migrations.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Section 1: The Basics
5
Section 2:Getting the Most out of Feature Management
11
Section 3: Mastering LaunchDarkly

Working with targeting and variations

The key to feature management and where LaunchDarkly really shines is in its ability to target feature flags' variations to specific users. This is done within the Targeting section of the Feature flags page. There are four key aspects to Targeting, and they are Prerequisites, Target Individual users, Target users who match these rules, and Default rule. These are shown in the following screenshot:

Figure 9.19 – The Targeting section of a feature flag

Much of this functionality has already been discussed in detail in previous chapters: targeting individual users or segments and targeting users who match a rule and default rule in Chapter 3, Basics of LaunchDarkly and Feature Management, and Chapter 4, Percentage and Ring Rollouts, respectively, and Prerequisites in Chapter 8, Migrations and Testing Your Infrastructure.

Next, will provide a simple overview of this section of the feature flag since more detailed...