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 LaunchDarkly's projects and environments

First, I want to talk about the projects and environments within LaunchDarkly – I have alluded to these already within this book, and it is worth looking at them now. When you created your account, you might have noticed the top-left of the screen, with text stating Default Project and Production. These denote the project and environment that you are currently in within LaunchDarkly, respectively. This information is visible at all times when working with LaunchDarkly because it underpins everything you will be doing within LaunchDarkly:

Figure 3.1 – The projects and environment information in the top-left corner of LaunchDarkly

You should create a project and two environments – production and test – by default within LaunchDarkly as this allows us to get going very quickly. It is worth understanding their purpose before we move on and set up our first feature flag.

Projects...