How to feature flag poorly & lessons learned Edith Harbaugh - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

How to feature flag poorly & lessons learned

Edith Harbaugh CEO & Cofounder @launchdarkly @Edith_H

Edith Harbaugh

Cofounder & CEO: LaunchDarkly Podcast cohost: “To Be Continuous” InfoQ, ReadWrite, DZone contributing author Engineering: Epicentric & Vignette Product: TripIt, Concur BS Engineering Harvey Mudd College

@Edith_H

IN THE LAST 10 YEARS, THE AVERAGE TIME TO RELEASE AN APPLICATION HAS GONE FROM YEARS TO WEEKS

OLD WORLD

Multiyear RELEASE CYCLE

NEW WORLD

WEEKLY RELEASE CYCLE

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Feature flags have become a critical part of how we roll out features, get feedback, and allow engineering and marketing to proceed on their own schedules.
 It’s hard to imagine DevOps services without them!

• Microsoft Engineering Leadership

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With LaunchDarkly we ship small changes very often. It makes it very easy to roll back a particular change, or even better: fix and roll-forward, and it helps us iterate very fast.

• DevOps 101, Atlassian

@Edith_H #softwareseatbel

Feature Kill Switches for unexpected events

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8

No long lived branches

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Controlled rollouts

10

Early access betas for your best guinea pigs best customers

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11 @edith_h

NONE SHALL PASS

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12 @edith_h

NONE SHALL PASS

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Kill your staging server

Developer

Environments

QA STAGING PRODUCTION

14

Subscriptions

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15

Sunset

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How to flag… poorly

Ambiguously named flags

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Surely you can’t be serious? I am serious… and don’t call me Shirley! I am serious… and don’t call me Shirley!

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Overused flags

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Conflicting flags

#softwareseatbelt @Edith_H

Feature flag!

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Leftover flags

Recipe for effective feature flag-driven development

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Flag carefully Lock down access Remove flags

How LaunchDarkly helps

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launchdarkly.com/Edith

LET’S TALK

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