Discover the next frontier of DevOps
Many organizations struggle to balance the need to increase developer productivity, stabilize software releases, modernize their tech stack, keep customers engaged, and innovate faster than competitors. DevOps tools and practices have helped enable progress in those areas. But gaps remain. This is especially true when it comes to connecting software development to the customer experience.
At LaunchDarkly, we are excited to announce the next frontier of DevOps with our latest product release. In this release, which we've unveiled at our Galaxy conference, we’re enabling product delivery teams to:
- Improve the velocity and stability of software releases while removing the fear of customer outages
- Target and personalize product experiences to any customer segment
- Maximize the business impact of every software feature through experimentation
- Optimize mobile app experiences by enabling you to release mobile features and fixes on your schedule, not the app store’s
- Increase developer productivity through insights into key engineering metrics
Read on for more detail on the game-changing features we've added to the LaunchDarkly platform!
Release Assistant
Automation for governance and rollouts
Safe and effective feature releases are how software development organizations connect their code to the end-user experience. So it’s imperative to release without any negative impact on customers—or engineering teams. But too often, software development organizations struggle to incorporate best practices and governance into their release processes, and they end up with ad-hoc release practices that are manual and time-consuming for developers. Additionally, there’s often no easy way to see the status of releases across an organization, leading to more inefficiency.
Release Assistant provides the ability to align releases to organizational best practices at scale with visibility into the status of all releases across an organization. With Release Assistant, LaunchDarkly customers can:
- Embed best practices into reusable release pipelines so every change can follow a successful path to production and ultimately save time
- Move flags across release pipelines knowing that LaunchDarkly will send an alert when phases are complete
- Track and know the exact release status of each feature with real-time visibility across each project for all of your stakeholders
Release Guardian
Automatically detect and resolve bugs
Bugs happen. Unfortunately, it just comes with the territory as a developer. Releasing a bug often results in end-users experiencing suboptimal application performance and, worst-case scenario, complete outages. Bugs disrupt your users, cost your company money, and cause your engineering team considerable stress.
But what if it were possible for a tool to detect and mitigate application regressions before they became incidents? With the announcement of Release Guardian, available for early access customers today, LaunchDarkly provides a proactive safety net for even the most complex product releases. By monitoring metrics with the release context, we can detect issues with higher sensitivity—even in the smallest releases, where issues would previously have been obscured by noise in the wider system metrics.
Release Guardian introduces:
- Observability at the feature level: Real-time metric monitoring and regression detection through active flag change monitoring, even for limited releases
- Automated incident response: Dynamic audience allocation and automated change reversion
Migration Assistant
Migrate and modernize tech stacks without the pain
Traditional “big-bang” migrations are daunting, high-risk, and stressful for engineering teams. But even if a migration or modernization project is broken down into stages, they are time-consuming to coordinate, expensive, and difficult to track at each stage. And migrations are high-risk for businesses: failed migrations can lead to app downtime, causing customer churn, lost revenue, and negative brand sentiment.
With the new LaunchDarkly Migration Assistant, now available in early access, engineering teams can control migrations through gradual rollouts so teams can modernize with more safety, predictability, and visibility. Whether you’re migrating to the cloud, a database, an API, or some other back-end service, Migration Assistant will help reduce risk, maintain business continuity, and let you measure consistency at every step.
This is made possible with:
- New migration flag types purpose-built to minimize migration effort and lower risk
- Controlled cohort progression to allow incrementally moving traffic allocation
- Consistency checks to maintain confidence in the results between old and new datastores
- Tracked migration metrics, like latency and error rate, to help inform each stage and step of a migration
Segment Builder
Target using data that powers your business
Delivering precise, tailored customer experiences is paramount in modern software delivery. But it’s easier said than done for engineering and product teams—especially when customer data is siloed from the release process.
LaunchDarkly’s latest targeting capabilities make delivering the right experiences to the right audiences faster and easier. Now, with LaunchDarkly’s Segment Builder, customers can:
- Effectively target using existing data sources, including Twilio Segment, Hightouch, Heap, RudderStack, Census, Tealium (coming soon), and Fulcrum
- Intuitively set up targeting rules and centrally manage audiences and experiences with visibility and control over the entire targeting process
- Confidently scale the use of targeting across the business and empower more teams to leverage LaunchDarkly targeting capabilities without increasing risk
Funnel Experiments
Maximize the business impact of every product feature
Experimentation is critical for measuring the business impact behind every feature release. However, far too many organizations struggle to get started with experimentation due to its complex nature, high learning curve, and disconnection from engineering processes.
With LaunchDarkly Funnel Experiments, unlock the ability to drive data-informed product updates. Funnel Experiments give developers and product managers alike the ability to:
- Safely and rapidly increase product performance by grouping experiment metrics to ensure effectiveness only improves over time
- Create specific experiments, such as user acquisition or monetization, to improve conversion rates and make data-informed product decisions
- Export experiment data and build custom analyses on results directly in your Snowflake data warehouse
Mobile Lifecycle Assistant
Optimize the mobile app version lifecycle
Mobile app development is uniquely complex due to tedious app store approvals, the inability to remotely control in-app features in real-time, and rising user expectations. LaunchDarkly’s latest enhancements for mobile apps save teams time and make it easier to deliver reliable, personalized experiences. Mobile development teams can take back control over their mobile apps across every stage of the mobile app lifecycle and:
- Quickly and easily target against common mobile application and device properties with auto-populated targeting contexts
- Easily target features to select audiences and deliver highly personalized experiences right from within LaunchDarkly
- Gracefully migrate devices off all legacy app versions and onto the latest app version—saving time and resources with the sunset of legacy app versions
- Maintain proper flag hygiene and ensure older app versions don’t break by deprecating flags before fully archiving them
Engineering Insights Hub
Boost engineering efficiency with key metrics
LaunchDarkly has long enabled developers to deliver features and experiences that customers love—and do so in less time with less risk. But to effectively maximize and scale the impact of LaunchDarkly, it’s crucial to measure and quantify success. With access to key engineering metrics, organizations can make data-informed decisions and promote engineering efficiency.
We are excited to announce the launch of the early access program waitlist for the LaunchDarkly Engineering Insights Hub. This feature set allows customers to:
- Quickly and easily access organization-level engineering productivity and efficiency metrics across projects
- Gain deeper insight into critical project-level metrics, empowering teams to identify bottlenecks in workflows and processes
- Ensure proper flag health by promoting best practices and archiving flags safely
Step into the future of DevOps
We hope you are as excited as we are about the latest releases and integrations unveiled at Galaxy! Our ultimate goal is to empower product delivery teams and developers to release software quickly and safely, create exceptional product experiences for every customer, and maximize overall business impact.
Are you ready to learn more about LaunchDarkly and how to take advantage of our latest product updates? Get a demo today.
