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

Chapter 12: Debugger and Audit Log

So far, this book has explored the theoretical uses of feature management and the ways in which LaunchDarkly can be used in these scenarios. In many of these scenarios, feature management has proven to be a methodology that reduces the risk of deployments and new code releases. Therefore, with the requirement of reducing risk, confidence in the feature management tool is crucial, which is why any good feature management tool needs to be trustworthy. LaunchDarkly offers two key functionalities that provide transparency and visibility regarding what is happening within the system.

The first piece of functionality is the Debugger. This offers a look at what LaunchDarkly is evaluating for feature flags, users, and experiments. The second component is the Audit log, which provides an overview of all the changes made within LaunchDarkly. Together, they give you the insight that is needed to trust the system, as the Debugger allows teams to understand...