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 how to use fewer environments for code development

In the previous section, we explored what it means to adopt a trunk-based development style and that once that is followed to a mature standard, it is possible to make further refinements to the process. While unit testing was mentioned in the previous section, the location of where to run the regression tests wasn't well detailed. That's because it is possible to move away from dedicated testing environments with this approach.

With the ability to deploy a new implementation to production, but having the feature turned off for customers, this presents the opportunity to do away with a dedicated testing environment. Code can be committed from a developer's computer to the main branch and then deployed to production, with us safely knowing that the code changes are contained within the feature flag's encapsulation. This works best when changes can't be committed until local tests have validated that...