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

Why experiment in production?

The production environment is the best place for you to be running your experiments as you are finding out tangible evidence about your technology and your customers. Other environments can also give you a good indication of how your technology will perform. Good customer research and modeling can provide a reliable indication of what customers want and how they will use the product, but neither is as reliable as actually finding out in production.

In addition to this, there are further opportunities that present themselves when using the production environment for validating technical and business hypotheses, such as trunk-based development, which will be explored in Chapter 7, Trunk-Based Development.

The kinds of experiments that are likely to be run in production differ from those that would normally be run in other environments. There are two types of features: those that will always form part of the product but need validation and those that...