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

Learning to implement switches within LaunchDarkly

To implement a switch within your application, you only need to encapsulate a feature within a Boolean feature flag, as we saw in Chapter 3, Basics of LaunchDarkly and Feature Management. There is nothing new when it comes to the actual implementation of making use of an if statement to offer two pieces of functionality based on what value LaunchDarkly is configured to serve; that is, either true or false. However, it is designed to always be within your application. You may not need to make any changes to how you would implement a flag, but there might be additional documentation or abstractions within your code to provide greater context about the long-lived flag within the application.

It is worth considering how you want to work with the default value of the feature flag within your application. So far, we have only ever considered the default value to be false if LaunchDarkly can't be unreached by your application. However...