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 billing and usage

The next sections that will be covered in Account settings are Billing and Usage. These two sections go hand in hand. Billing provides information about the type of plan that the account is using, and the Usage section shows how much of the quota of the account's plan remain from the previous month.

There are four metrics that determine the usage of a plan:

  • Seats: This is the limit of how many members will be in the account.
  • Client-side MAUs: This is the limit of how many Monthly Active Users (MAUs) there will be from the client-side SDK. This forms part of the plan as the evaluation is done on LaunchDarkly's hardware, and they incur this cost and that of the bandwidth requirements. When using server-side SDKs, the evaluation is done by your application on your own hardware, so you are paying that cost. The fact that the usage of the client-side SDKs can have an impact on what plan is needed and how much LaunchDarkly will cost...