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

Chapter 2: Overview of Feature Management

The purpose of this chapter is to explain what feature management is, how it empowers software development and product teams, and how it can be used to reduce risk when implementing and deploying new features.

We will look at the two main types of feature flags—temporary feature flags and permanent feature flags. There will be a comparison between these types of feature flags with information around some of the use cases that will be explored later in this book, such as percentage rollouts, ring rollouts, and switches. The chapter will then conclude with information about the process of testing in production and the value that this can add to a team, a product, and a business.

In this chapter, we will explore the following topics:

  • An introduction to a feature and how it works
  • Understanding temporary feature flags
  • Understanding permanent feature flags
  • Learning testing in production

I will approach these...