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 trunk-based development

A very common approach to building software is to use the Git Flow (GitKraken's definition: https://www.gitkraken.com/learn/git/git-flow) branching strategy to manage the source code and ensure there is good version control of the software changes. The name comes from the opportunity to make use of branches within the Git SCM tool and ensuring that changes flow through a series of branches before reaching production.

The approach was first introduced in 2010 to simplify release management by isolating different types of work into different branches. I will outline how this approach works before explaining why a trunk-based approach can be a better way of working with Git and branches. Git Flow follows the principle of having the following types of branches:

  • Main: The main branch (often referred to as the master branch, but this is now an outdated term) is the trunk of the Git branches. This is the production-ready branch where tested...