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

Technical requirements

When walking through how to set up and configure feature flags and experiments, there will be some code examples and many screenshots of LaunchDarkly. You can use the code samples from Chapter 3, Basics of LaunchDarkly and Feature Management, to set up an application with LaunchDarkly to test out the LaunchDarkly configuration yourself if you wish.

For the examples I am providing, I am using Visual Studio 2019 on a Windows PC, C#, and .NET. There is no technical reason to use these specific tools and languages and if you want, you can use Visual Studio Code, a Mac computer, and/or a different language or framework to follow along with the examples.

You can find the code files for this chapter here: https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Feature-Management-with-LaunchDarkly/tree/main/Chapter%205. There is a completed version of the application you can look at once all the steps outlined in this chapter have been followed.