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 targeting with users and segments

Several of the previous chapters have presented examples of how to target features at users, be it specific targeting or through the use of percentage and ring rollouts. Both Chapter 3, Basics of LaunchDarkly and Feature Management, and Chapter 4, Percentage and Ring Rollouts, provided good examples of targeting users. In this section, more details and examples will be provided to show off more use cases of LaunchDarkly's targeting.

With regards to targeting a feature flag's variation at specific individual users, there is not too much to say as there is a single configuration option. For each variation that's available on the flag, there is the option to add a specific user to receive one of the outcomes. This is true of all types of feature flags, including multi-variant ones, as seen here:

Figure 10.12 – Targeting specific users

The specific targeting is executed ahead of checking a user...