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

Using LaunchDarkly for percentage rollouts

To roll out a feature to a percentage of customers, we need to create and configure a feature flag. Chapter 3, Basics of LaunchDarkly and Feature Management, shows how to set one up. In this example, the only difference you will notice is that the name of the flag is different. For each example, you might want to create a new feature flag. Once you have created a new flag, we will start exploring percentage rollouts by looking at the Default rule property of the flag.

When creating a new Boolean flag, the Default rule property is set to true. In Chapter 3, Basics of LaunchDarkly and Feature Management, we looked at how this works when the targeting of the feature flag is enabled to serve either true or false. However, there are three states a flag can be configured to serve:

  • true
  • false
  • a percentage rollout

In this case, we will be looking at the third option, as shown in the following screenshot:

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