LaunchDarkly’s vision of feature management

Software powers the world. LaunchDarkly empowers all teams to deliver and control their software. Theoretically, teams can engage in all four pillars of feature management without relying on a dedicated feature management tool. In many cases, engineers will construct a patchwork solution for feature flag management in-house. Some organizations, however, do build and use world-class homegrown systems. But in our experience, the latter is the exception. Unsurprisingly, LaunchDarkly contends that, in the long-run, a commercial feature management platform is more affordable, sustainable, and painless than the alternative. You can explore the pros and cons of building vs. buying a feature management solution here . ...

October 20, 2024 · 5 min · 2275 words · Joey

Operate - The second pillar

What is Operate? Operate, the second of the Four Pillars of Feature Management, encompasses feature flag use cases that improve the operational health of your application. It entails making feature flags a mission-critical piece of your operations. As deployment speeds and infrastructural complexity go up, so does the need for operational safeguards. Feature management is that safeguard. Teams that use feature flags via a feature management platform reduce risk and ensure customers remain satisfied with their service. They dramatically cut down on serious incidents. For example, as previously cited, Honeycomb has a “change fail rate” of just 0.1% , a feat shared only by the world’s most elite software teams. And the company cites its use of LaunchDarkly as a big reason for its exceedingly low failure rate. ...

October 20, 2024 · 14 min · 6692 words · Joey