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 a rollout

Throughout the first three chapters of this book, I have explained how using feature management can help reduce the risk of releasing new features to production, and how new implementations can be proven to be effective before getting released to 100% of customers. Rolling out a feature is how we can achieve this.

There are two types of rollouts: percentage and ring. You might have heard of this type of feature management being referred to as a progressive rollout, since a feature progresses either through an incremental percentage of customers or through various rings (or groups) of customers. We will look at both of these approaches to understand their value and uses.

One thing to be aware of with rollouts is that they are usually intended to be temporary. The name implies that this approach to feature management is just about getting something rolled out and once that is achieved, the feature flag's encapsulation can be removed from the code base...