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

Getting started with LaunchDarkly

The first thing you are going to need to do to get started with LaunchDarkly is to create an account. Depending on your use case, you could use a 2-week trial with a personal account or you might want to reach out to LaunchDarkly to discuss having a trial account for your company. For this chapter, a free trial personal account will be fine.

You can create an account at https://launchdarkly.com/packt.

Once you've created your account, LaunchDarkly will offer you a quick start tutorial, which you might find useful as it covers similar topics to this section but without some of the explanations and details I will provide. I will approach things from a different angle and explain some of the steps that LaunchDarkly automatically does for you when your account is created.

To start, we will set up the LaunchDarkly client within your application. LaunchDarkly provides several SDKs, and while you can implement your own system to work with LaunchDarkly...