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 Settings

Settings contains several properties and configuration options that are available through other areas of LaunchDarkly, but it does offer some unique functionality too. The first setting that can be changed is the data export configuration, which is what we previously explored within the Experimentation section in terms of selecting which targeting rules should be used when evaluating a feature flag experiment. Most of the functionality is the same as within the Experimentation section. However, it is possible to disable the ability to send detailed event data to the export locations. When using the data for experimentation, detailed data needs to be sent, and this cannot be turned off.

The second piece of functionality within Settings is Triggers. Triggers is a feature that can only be found in enterprise-level subscriptions, so it is not available on every plan. Triggers provide the opportunity for other services and systems to control the targeting of a flag...