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

Summary

From this chapter, you should have gained an understanding of what a switch is and how feature management provides this opportunity. In many ways, a switch is a simpler concept of feature management than rollouts or experiments. However, a switch does not help you build and refine your product. Instead, it is used to manage your application, should there be any issues that can be improved by disabling aspects of the product and customer experience.

We explored how switches can be used to turn off functionality that is outside your control, or to deal with unlikely but possible scenarios where non-essential processes and systems can be bypassed. There might not be many opportunities to employ this strategy within your product, but this can be valuable when you want to buy some time and resources to restore normal stability and essential functionality to your customers. The other way in which switches can be used is to enable functionality for specific users, perhaps to gain...