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 role management

To ensure you are on the right path in terms of using LaunchDarkly, the last topic we will cover in this chapter is role management. So far, we have been working with the Test environment of our Default Project as that's the safest way to approach using LaunchDarkly and roles, as well as their associated permissions. This allows us to continue to work with the tool in this manner. We want to restrict who can change flags and targeting rules within the production environment, but other environments are likely to be less restrictive so that our teams can remain productive. Role management can enable these types of scenarios, and many more, through its powerful permission system.

However, before we look at role management, it is worth considering how to work between different environments of a LaunchDarkly project. Right now, our app has the SDK key hardcoded within the code base, which is a bad practice. Instead, we should be using a tool to achieve...