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

Understanding permanent feature flags

Unsurprisingly, permanent feature flags are the opposite of temporary ones, as they are put into an app with the expectation that they will be there for a long time and are not time-limited. As mentioned in the Understanding temporary feature flags section, many flags are often short. However, there are some good reasons and use cases for long-lived flags, too.

Again, it is worth pointing out that applications with a large number of permanent feature flags could be difficult to manage and could easily introduce unexpected instability into a system.

Two common uses of permanent feature flags are switches and entitlements. Entitlements are a way of enabling or disabling features based on a customer's account tier or subscription. For example, a feature can be served to a VIP customer but not to other customers. In this way, feature management can form part of the business model of a company and be more than just a mechanism to safely release...