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 segments

While users, within the context of LaunchDarkly, require implementation in the code base, the concept of segments exists within the tool itself. A segment can be considered a group of users that all fall within a certain category. This grouping is defined within LaunchDarkly and relies on the targeting rules we have already seen in several chapters, especially Chapter 4, Percentage and Ring Rollouts. We will see them in the next couple of sections as well.

Segments can be used to great effect when there are frequently used targeting rules or features that are regularly rolled out to certain groups of customers. Because the segments are created with the same attributes that are used within the targeting rules, some custom attributes might be used across several or all applications within your system to ensure segments can be used effectively. For example, there might a classification for a customer, such as new customer, regular customer, and VIP. By providing...