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

Summary

From this chapter, you should have gained an understanding of how feature flags can change the processes by which software can be built and deployed. The opportunity of moving to a trunk-based development style over more traditional methodologies such as Git Flow presents some real opportunities to decrease the development and delivery time of work. There is also the chance to reduce admin overheads of managing multiple branches and multiple test environments. Once you're confident with feature management within your application, it is worth considering how trunk-based development can aid in the development and delivery of code too.

By looking at the Git Flow branching strategy, we compared the trunk-based approach against it. By relying on feature flags and keeping branches closer to the trunk rather than creating release branches and feature branches, work can be done more efficiently and without the increased likelihood of merge conflicts.

The two ways to achieve...