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LaunchDarkly is how the best companies ship software. Software teams across practically every industry—including entertainment, digital streaming, fintech, agriculture, and technology—are using LaunchDarkly to continuously ship features and updates, faster and with less risk.
But, to paraphrase the immortal LeVar Burton, you don’t have to take our word for it. In this blog post, we’ll examine how five leading companies leverage LaunchDarkly to enter a new frontier of DevOps—where engineering teams can build products customers love.
Let’s explore how LaunchDarkly helped these companies deploy more and de-risk releases, improve mean time to restore service (MTTR) after incidents, reduce inter-team dependencies, implement trunk-based deployment and continuous delivery, and more.
1. AMC answers the “Barbenheimer” challenge
For theater chain giant AMC, digital experiences are big business. The company earns over $1B in annual revenue from its website and mobile apps.
So, when AMC experienced a sudden surge of traffic driven by the unexpected and simultaneous popularity of Barbie and Oppenheimer (a phenomenon popularly known as “Barbenheimer”) the stakes were high. A single moment of downtime across any portion of the company’s digital portfolio could send theatergoers flocking to alternatives—and prove enormously costly.
With the help of LaunchDarkly, however, AMC answered the challenge. The company was able to ensure stability and prevent downtime throughout the surge by load shedding on LaunchDarkly—i.e., using feature flags to quickly turn off specific features that were unnecessary for ticket sales.
“We’ve feature-flagged almost everything for quite a while,” said Travis Maddox, Senior Director of Consumer Applications at AMC. “It gives us the ability to absorb a lot of these high-volume events.”
AMC’s journey with LaunchDarkly began with the company seeking to improve its targeting capabilities, and its use of the platform has grown quickly over the five years since. Today, LaunchDarkly helps AMC achieve risk-free and scheduled mobile app deployments, launch new features to targeted user groups, experiment and test new capabilities, resolve problems faster, and measure the business value of every feature.
2. Hulu seamlessly launches major UI update to 39M users
Imagine shipping a completely new user interface (UI) simultaneously to 39 million users across five distinct app code bases, six platforms (and many more distinct device types), and 30+ different app versions running at any one time.
It may sound like the setup to a developer disaster movie, but it’s actually what Hulu planned to do at the stroke of midnight in early 2021. And—with a lot of planning and a big assist from LaunchDarkly—the team pulled it off without a hitch.
“We were able to use five rules with five segments configured using custom attributes from our servers to target all the rules in the right places at the right time,” said Dominic Hopton, Client Architect at Hulu.
As Hulu prepared for the launch, the company discovered that it could drastically improve scalability by setting up LaunchDarkly users to represent devices rather than people.
According to Senior Software Engineer Matthieu Labbe, this new approach would allow Hulu to scale to a billion devices. “The state just grows with the number of LaunchDarkly rules and flags that we have,” he explained.
3. Ally Financial discovers a better feature management tool
Jeremy Cox, Application Manager at Ally Financial (Ally), compares his team’s pre-LaunchDarkly feature management practices to sharpening a woodworking pencil with a belt sander.
When Jeremy joined Ally, the company was having issues with build-time feature controls. Jeremy and his team determined that using runtime feature controls would provide better results—but, facing a tight timeline, they were unable to implement a new platform.
Instead, the Ally team repurposed an existing tool that was designed for marketing content targeting.
“That was just asking for trouble,” Jeremy said.
Making changes through the ad-hoc solution was a slow, error-prone process. The team had no true testing environment, and the customer experience was impacted by ad blockers.
“We learned a lot of lessons that we could apply once we got the right tool in place,” Jeremy said.
Ally determined that LaunchDarkly was the exact tool it needed, implementing the platform in early 2020. With LaunchDarkly, Ally could now target specific test accounts, protect pre-conditioned test data, flag everything, and test in production.
“Organizations will tolerate using the wrong tools for all sorts of reasons: convenience, familiarity…sometimes it’s just plain laziness…(but) having the right tool makes all the difference,” Jeremy said.
4. Bayer’s digital farming arm improves app reliability
At Climate LLC (Climate)—Bayer Crop Science's digital arm—feature management needs were heating up. As the company’s growth began outpacing its initial software development capabilities, Climate turned to LaunchDarkly to bolster the reliability of its FieldView™ platform, a tool used by farmers in 23 countries around the world.
With LaunchDarkly, Climate has fortified app stability and reduced the risks of downtime. If an app feature encounters a glitch, the company’s software team can use feature flags to disable it in runtime, with no need to push a fix or code change through the deployment pipeline. This delivers peace of mind to farmers who rely on products like Climate’s FieldView Cab App for support during their most sensitive planting, management, and harvest activities.
With LaunchDarkly, Climate standardized its process for high-speed, low-risk software releases. This integration has streamlined development practices, enabling features to be deployed based on specific user attributes. The result? Enhanced software reliability, increased developer productivity, and faster, more frequent releases.
5. HP standardizes and scales releases
Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” We don’t know what it means, either—but we do know that HP's Print Software division was grappling with inconsistencies in its software deployment processes for some time.
To streamline and accelerate releases, HP chose to standardize the use of LaunchDarkly. The effort paid off—reducing deployment and remediation times from hours to minutes.
Thanks to LaunchDarkly’s enhanced feature-flagging capabilities, HP developers could now easily toggle features on and off independently, without the need for a full release. Additionally, the team could validate and alter feature behaviors in real-time and without any code changes, leading to a faster QA process.
Standardizing and scaling its releases with LaunchDarkly also proved popular. Alan Santos, Manager of Research and Development at HP, recalled the astonishment of his teammates during an early LaunchDarkly demo that showcased instant feature toggling. "Everyone was going crazy,” he said. It's something amazing."
About LaunchDarkly
DevOps has spawned tremendous innovation from CI/CD to agile planning. However, the ongoing struggle to connect the code from engineering teams to compelling customer experiences creates inefficient development cycles, costly outages, and fragmented experiences. The LaunchDarkly platform helps engineers connect their work to the thing that matters most—their customers. Now, developers have a safety valve to instantly rewind when things go wrong to improve the velocity and stability of releases. They can target product experiences to any customer segment and maximize the business impact of every feature. And teams using LaunchDarkly easily drive consistent, engaging mobile experiences through better coordination and optimization of app development. With LaunchDarkly, engineers increase release velocity by 9x, reduce service outages by 97% and ensure over 99% of users get a bug-free software experience. See why engineering teams at the most innovative companies, including 25 percent of the Fortune 500, build products that customers love with LaunchDarkly. Learn more at www.launchdarkly.com.
