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

How to manage users and segments

To manage users within LaunchDarkly, there is a dashboard that offers similar management functionality to that of feature flags, as seen in Chapter 9, Feature Flag Management in Depth. For the screenshots in this section, the code samples we used in the previous section to show how to build user objects have been used, with an additional user taking my name. These users can be seen here:

Figure 10.1 – The Users dashboard

By default, the Users dashboard shows all the users that have experienced a feature flag evaluation within the last 30 days. It presents user information such as Key, Email address, and when the user was last seen within any application calling the environment within the selected project. In this case, I am still using the default project and test environment.

As can be seen from this view, neither Kevin C nor I have email address attributes. That is because for my user, I did not provide one, but...