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 Debugger and flag events

The Debugger can be accessed via the LaunchDarkly navigation bar. When you first open it, it will only show a little information because it is a live stream of data that any LaunchDarkly clients using the SDK key will connect to, and so the data will be streamed to this page over time. There are three sections to the Debugger: Flag events, User events, and Experimentation events. To begin with, we will examine the Flag events:

Figure 12.1 – The Debugger

As shown in the preceding screenshot, the Debugger section can be used to check which flag evaluations are occurring. This is especially useful for teams. And, as we will learn in this section, there are a few key pieces of information that are provided by the Debugger. The Debugger starts working once the page is opened and is a frontend view of a stream of data. Sometimes, it takes a little while for the data to start appearing on the page. Once flag events...