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

Discovering how to perform migrations with LaunchDarkly

Much of what has been described so far regarding feature management and where LaunchDarkly can be useful has been about making small, testable changes to your application, such as rolling out the change to a segment of your customer base and validating that it works technically, before moving on to running an experiment to see how the customers interact with and experience the feature. Sometimes, the changes that need to be made just cannot be done in such a small or iterative manner. Instead, there is a substantial change that needs to be released to production.

These large changes could include the following:

  • Rearchitecting existing services. That requires working within client applications to support this change, which could result in fewer dependencies within a client application.
  • Rebuilding a single backend system, which requires users to be migrated.
  • Moving systems to a new location or URL. For example...