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

Exploring switches

The basic idea of a feature flag is simple and as we saw in Chapter 3, Basics of LaunchDarkly and Feature Management, they are easy to implement too. This simple yet powerful encapsulation has been the basis of both rollouts and experiments and ultimately, it has been about being able to enable or disable a feature before exposing it to all customers. This might have been to assess that either a technical hypothesis or business hypothesis is correct. By enabling a feature on the production environment and getting customers to interact with the new implementation, there is the opportunity to gain insight and validate an idea. Once proved successful, the feature can be rolled out to all customers. The feature flag encapsulation is then removed so that the new code is the only code that will be executed.

However, with the ability to turn on and off components within the system, there are scenarios where this ability to manage features becomes valuable permanently...