DevOps West: Feature flags for Clean Deployments

Software teams want to move faster and deliver features to end users sooner. Continuous delivery and DevOps promise to deploy quickly. However, pushing faster and deploying more often increase the risk of breaking—and subsequent downtime. Edith Harbaugh finds that a feature flagging system of gating features—and being able to quickly turn them on or off—enables development teams to ship more frequently. With feature flags, engineering changes are pushed live to production “off” and then turned on for different users. Feature flags allow developers to separate deployment from rollout, enabling the ability to quickly throttle features for different user segments. Feature flags are used by Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Amazon to reduce risk, increase time to market, and delight end users. Learn how your developers, product managers, and testers can use feature flags for opt-in early access, private beta, canary launches, and dark releases.

Speaker
Edith Harbaugh
LaunchDarkly
CEO and cofounder of LaunchDarkly Edith Harbaugh has more than fifteen years of experience in software engineering with both consumer and enterprise startups. Previously, she scaled TripIt to 10 million users. Edith was product manager at Vignette, a global content management company, which powered NASA, Volkswagen, and IRS.gov. She co-hosts To Be Continuous (@continuouscast), a podcast on software trends. Edith holds two patents in deployment between QA, staging, and production.

Transcript

1. Feature Flags for Clean Deployments Edith Harbaugh @LaunchDarkly LaunchDarkly.com
2. Edith Harbaugh •  Cofounder & CEO, LaunchDarkly •  Podcast cohost, “To Be Continuous” •  BS Engineering Harvey Mudd College •  Engineering, Epicentric & Vignette •  Product, Monster.com, EasyBloom, TripIt •  Marketing, Concur
3. Tsunami Software Releases
4. Feature Flags
5. Feature Flags! •  Push functionality to who you want, when you want •  Expand or roll back, without a new deployment •  Separate code deployment from business logic •  Get real-world feedback and analytics •  No more long running branches with merge conflicts
6. Use Feature Flags to expose functionality when you want, to who you want
7. No long lived branches
8. Kill Your Staging Server Developer Environments QA STAGING PRODUCTION
9. Early Access Betas
10. Opt-In
11. Block
12. Rollouts
13. Hypothesis Driven Development
14. Newbie > Power User
15. Subscription
16. Sunset
17. Best Practices for Feature Flagging •  What’s  the  right  level  of  flagging?   •  Ambiguously  named  flags   •  Misunderstood  flags   •  Removing  flags   •  Control  access  to  flags     •  Visibility  to  non-­‐technical  users   •  Logging   •  Dependency  tracking      
18. edith@launchdarkly.com @Edith_H @continuousCast