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

Understanding the user

Throughout this book, we have explored various aspects of the user and how to implement the User object within your applications. It is important to understand that the user is as crucial to feature management as the feature flag itself. Without the ability to know who the user is and their details, it is very difficult to target features at specific customers or percentages or rings of customers. We have already discussed using ring and percentage rollouts to target users in detail in Chapter 4, Percentage and Ring Rollouts.

The concept of a user extends further to not necessarily dealing with actual people or customers but a request or a session. This allows systems to communicate without an actual customer making a request. With this in mind, the User object that LaunchDarkly uses can be considered as more than just a person. It can be considered as an object in which metadata can be provided to enable or disable features. For example, the version number...