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

Summary

To get the most out of feature management, there needs to be a certain level of confidence and reliability in the tool that is being used to change the availability of functionality within a production system. LaunchDarkly not only provides the functionality to enable feature flags targeting, experimentation, and rollouts, but it also offers a wealth of other features to manage the risk of inadvertent changes to production or malicious actors getting into the system. This chapter, although not dealing with feature management functionality directly, shows how LaunchDarkly can be configured according to the team and business needs.

Using projects and environments, flags can be grouped to best serve different team structures and business needs. Measures can be imposed on certain environments to ensure good governance and to limit the chance of negative changes being made. Adding to that, members of the LaunchDarkly account can be limited in what they can do using the powerful...