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 3: Basics of LaunchDarkly and Feature Management

In this chapter, we will build on the knowledge you now have of feature management and provide practical examples of how it can help us build and deliver software in new, more efficient, and safer ways. I will cover feature flag management within LaunchDarkly itself: how to implement a flag within an application, how we can target users with features, how to understand the LaunchDarkly User system, and how to perform the necessary targeting.

Before we set up a feature flag, I will walk you through setting up the LaunchDarkly client within an application. This will require us to look at both projects and environments within LaunchDarkly. These will help segregate the feature flags by teams/concerns and by the environments (production, test, and so on) that are used.

To ensure that you have set up LaunchDarkly properly from the beginning, I will also detail the role management functionality, which provides permissions and...