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

Discovering use cases for switches

The first type of use case I want to explore is where functionality is turned off. This approach is sometimes called the kill-switch, circuit breaker pattern, or (to give a more positive spin) safety valve. The only place where you might want to employ this use of switches is where you have non-critical functionality that you might want to turn off.

It is not often that there is some functionality within your system where it would be acceptable for it to not be executed. However, this approach works when the product is in a bad place and there is a need to do whatever is necessary to restore some sort of normality to the application. With this in mind, I have experience of using kill switches on both frontend and backend applications, such as in the following scenarios:

  • Encapsulating third-party scripts within the client: Often, websites and applications contain several third-party scripts that are used for tracking, telemetry, and analytics...