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 Audit log

In Chapter 9, Feature Flag Management in Depth, we looked at a historical view of all the changes that are made to an individual feature flag. We established that this was useful for audit purposes and to identify changes that were made to revert to a previous state if needed. LaunchDarkly not only provides this type of information for flags but also for the whole tool itself. The Audit log tracks change across a whole environment. It details information relating to feature flags, including the following:

  • The creation, archiving, and deletion of flags
  • Changes to the targeting rules of a flag, including the enabling or disabling of the targets
  • Experiment changes to a flag, including the reset of the collected data

Additional information is recorded for the creation and deletion of segments. The view of this information is similar to the History section that we looked at for feature flags:

Figure 12.10 –...