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 LaunchDarkly – the dashboard and feature flags

To begin with, we will start with the feature flag dashboard, which is the default screen of LaunchDarkly. It is within this screen, besides the individual feature flags, where most of your time will be spent within LaunchDarkly.

Overview of LaunchDarkly

The following screenshot shows the whole LaunchDarkly experience. We will explain this before we provide information about the functionality available to manage the flags on the dashboard:

Figure 9.1 – The feature flag dashboard, the default page of LaunchDarkly

On the left-hand side of the LaunchDarkly product is the sidebar, where you can navigate between the main areas of the site. The large area on the right is where you will find the main functionalities of the tool, and this changes for each area of the site. In the preceding screenshot, you can see a list of feature flags. We will come back to them soon, but I will briefly...