Over the past decade, we’ve seen tremendous innovations to the software development life cycle (SDLC). The move from agile to CI/CD methodologies has completely transformed the speed at which organizations ship new features.
But in spite of lots of innovation, that moment of truth when a new feature—that your team has spent weeks planning—is first rolled out to customers is still a stressful event.
LaunchDarkly was founded on the belief that the idea of “release” is in need of a refresh. That next stage of evolution is happening now, and it is rapidly changing the set of practices we follow beyond deployment.
We think of the moment of truth when code meets customers as the last mile of your software delivery process. When your teams are confident and in control while releasing software, you have a chance to truly transform software delivery.
Our co-founder and CTO, John Kodumal, recently gave a product keynote at Trajectory, LaunchDarkly’s annual conference, talking about reimagining this last mile of continuous delivery. In this post, we’ll recap those major product announcements that are helping organizations transform their delivery processes at scale.
Want to see these new features in action? Check out our Trajectory 2021 Product Keynote.
Build and automate complex, multi-stage releases with the Workflow builder
We’ve launched a major update to LaunchDarkly’s Feature Workflows capabilities, which gives teams a single place to collaborate, build, and automate feature rollouts. We’ve added a new tab on the feature flag page, called “Workflows,” which allows you to plan out your feature flag rollouts across many stages on a single timeline. During each stage, you’ll be able to schedule multiple changes to your feature flags with their own specific dates and times as well as request the necessary approvals needed before taking action.
Workflows is available in Beta to all Enterprise plan customers. If your team is not on an Enterprise plan and wants to get access to Workflows, join our Early Access Program.
Expand the flag network by bringing your own CDN
In the past, some organizations were forced to make a trade off between speed and security when using feature flags on the client-side. You either expose your flag rules to end users to guarantee fast delivery on the client-side or secure them at a central location but risk slower initialization speeds and potential content flashes for users.
Earlier this year, we announced Flag Delivery at Edge which dramatically reduces SDK initialization times on the client-side while keeping your feature flag logic safe. To accomplish this, we moved significant portions of our flag evaluation tooling from our core LaunchDarkly infrastructure, out to the Content Delivery Network (CDN) layer of our architecture.
Take that one step further with our new CDN integrations, which allow you to bring your own CDN to keep flag caching as close to your customer workloads as possible. Our first CDN integration with Cloudflare is available now in Early Access for customers with an Enterprise plan. Now you can leverage LaunchDarkly features without having your application reach back to LaunchDarkly at all, giving you full customization around your caching strategy and architecture.
Learn more about the Cloudflare integration
Organize and manage teams of users within LaunchDarkly
We’ve been investing a lot this year to make LaunchDarkly even easier to use inside large organizations. Large organizations count on LaunchDarkly to manage launches across many teams. Sometimes those teams need to work closely together and sometimes they need to stay out of each other’s way. So we’re giving customers the tools they need to adopt, manage, and expand the use of LaunchDarkly. Organizations with thousands of team members can onboard, view, and manage members by team with ease.
At Trajectory, we introduced a first-class way to group members by team and easily partition their access to LaunchDarkly projects, environments, and flags. Soon these teams will have a dedicated dashboard with everything they need to do their job effectively; including their projects, the flags their team maintains, pending approval requests for the team, a list of their team members, and more. And we’re also going to make it even easier to manage teams by integrating with your identity providers such as Okta to automatically sync team members with LaunchDarkly.
Enterprise customers can sign up for the Early Access Program to try out teams as we continue to build new features. Team management will be generally available to all Enterprise customers later this year.
Learn more about creating teams
Create new experiments with ease and measure the true impact of your releases
During our Fall ‘21 Product Release, we introduced our new experiment traffic allocation functionality that makes running valid experiments within LaunchDarkly a more seamless experience. As part of our commitment to help every team experiment successfully, we've announced a new set of functionality that will make it even easier to create experiments and ensure you are setting them up correctly.
This new experiment builder will walk you through all the necessary steps to define a hypothesis, select the metrics you want to measure, ensure you have the right experiment variations in place, and allocate traffic to the correct audience.
Our vision is for LaunchDarkly Experimentation to be able to fly copilot on every release and tell you automatically whether your new feature is performing the way it should be, specifically for the customers exposed to that feature. The new experiment builder will be available to customers in 2022.
Toggle LaunchDarkly feature flags directly from a Datadog Dashboard
Monitoring the performance of new features your team is releasing is a critical step to ensuring customer satisfaction. As an increasingly essential platform for monitoring and security of cloud applications, Datadog continues to help customers, like us, make their complex systems more observable.
LaunchDarkly and Datadog have a longstanding partnership and integration. Customers can already register LaunchDarkly activity as a Datadog event to compare and correlate changes in their metrics with changes in their feature flags.
We’ve added to those capabilities using the new Datadog Apps. You can now collect and publish a specific set of feature flags on any Datadog dashboard. Bringing LaunchDarkly into Datadog means you can also preplan your feature release and associated monitoring in one place, so you can monitor while you toggle.
Learn more about the new LaunchDarkly App for Datadog
Get a sneak peek of all these features (and more) in action
Check out our Trajectory 2021 Product Keynote, where we discuss all the latest enhancements to the LaunchDarkly platform, including every feature mentioned in this blog plus a whole lot more.
What’s on deck
We have a lot more exciting product updates to share soon. During our Spring ‘22 Product Release, we will be sharing even more improvements to our feature workflows capabilities—including workflow templates that can be applied across multiple feature flags to easily ensure a consistent release process across your entire organization.
Want to be the first to try our latest features?
Join our Early Access Program to unlock access to our newest features. Sign up here.
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