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

In this chapter, we looked at how feature management can be used in more ways than just building features. By using feature flags in a slightly different scenario, it is possible to make large system changes and migrate from an old infrastructure to a new one in a safe and controlled manner.

We looked at how, by encapsulating the new system's endpoints, updated requests and responses, and new implementations, migrations can be safely performed. This work can be done in many client applications at the same time for larger migrations. Once the implementations have been tested and validated, it is possible to migrate customers from the old systems to the new ones.

Building on the approach of adding feature flags to backend systems, there are some new opportunities for testing the production environment. Through building mock endpoints, a high level of load can be put on the product to ensure it handles traffic to the expected levels. By testing production in this non...