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

Learning about feature flags and users

The first thing we must do when creating and implementing a feature flag is create one within LaunchDarkly. From there, we can implement that flag within the application. You will find the functionality to create a new flag in the Feature flags section of the site. Before you create a new flag, it is worth confirming that you are within the Test environment of Default Project, as outlined in the previous section. You can create your first flag here: https://app.launchdarkly.com/default/production/features/new.

When creating a new flag, there are several options and controls available. However, we only need to concern ourselves with the Name and Key fields for now. I will be covering all the other options and features of a flag throughout the rest of this book, especially in Chapter 9, Feature Flag Management in Depth.

The Name attribute can be anything you like – it's worth making it meaningful so that it's easy to identify...