Releasing features with LaunchDarkly

Overview

This topic compares several options LaunchDarkly provides for releasing features to production safely and gradually.

You can use this comparison to help you choose the release option that best matches your release goal. For example, you may want to serve a fixed percentage of traffic to a variation, increase traffic automatically over time, monitor release health and roll back if metrics regress, or compare variations to decide which performs best.

Choose a release option

Choose your release option based on the outcome you want:

Percentage rollouts: Serve a flag variation to a fixed percentage of contexts.
Progressive rollouts: Increase traffic to a flag variation automatically over time.
Guarded rollouts: Increase traffic over time while monitoring metrics for regressions.
Experiments: Compare variations and choose the best performer based on metric results.

Use the release options comparison table for more detail about how each option works, when to use it, and where it is available.

Release options comparison

The following table compares functionality that LaunchDarkly provides for releasing features:

Release option	Description	Example use case	Availability
Percentage rollouts	This option on a flag’s targeting rule serves a given flag variation to a specified percentage of contexts. The percentage of customers receiving a variation does not change over time. To automatically increase the percentage, use progressive rollouts, described below. Affects one targeting rule in one environment.	Use percentage rollouts if you want to randomly allocate traffic by context kind and attribute, for example, if you want to test a new feature on a subset of end users in production. If you later change the percentage in the percentage rollout, the flag variation that any particular customer receives may change each time you change the percentage. To learn more, read Percentage rollout logic.	Percentage rollouts are available to all plans and work with all flag types.
Progressive rollouts	This option on a flag’s targeting rule serves a given flag variation to a specified percentage of contexts, and gradually increases that percentage over a specified time. With this option, the percentage of customers receiving a variation automatically increases over time. Affects one targeting rule in one environment, over time.	Use progressive rollouts if you want to randomly allocate traffic by context kind, and automatically increase the amount of traffic to a specific flag variation over time. As the rollout progresses, the flag variation that any particular customer receives changes only once.	Progressive rollouts are available to all plans and work with all flag types.
Guarded rollouts	This option on a flag’s targeting rule serves a given flag variation to a specified percentage of contexts, and gradually increases that percentage over a specified time. This option monitors the rollout for regressions based on metrics you select, and can automatically notify you and roll back if a regression is detected. Metrics appear as tile-based relative difference charts that show how the treatment compares to the control over time, with confidence bounds and a dotted line representing the regression threshold. Affects one targeting rule in one environment, over time.	Use guarded rollouts if you want to randomly allocate traffic by context kind, and automatically increase the amount of traffic to a specific flag variation over time, while monitoring selected metrics. For example, this option can monitor latency and error rates specific to the traffic receiving the selected flag variation. LaunchDarkly notifies you or automatically reverts the rollout if regressions are detected.	Guarded rollouts are only available on a Guardian plan. Guarded rollouts are available for all flag types except migration flags.
Experiments	This option on a flag’s targeting rule compares the performance of two or more flag variations against each other. Experiments track the performance of one or more metrics for each variation over time, and determine which variation performs the best. Affects one targeting rule in one environment, over time.	Use experiments when you want to decide which variation performs better by monitoring selected metrics.	Experiments are available for all flag types except migration flags.

Additional release management tools

In addition to several rollout options, LaunchDarkly provides tools for managing the steps of your release. Choose the tools that work best for your release and change management processes.

The topics in the Release management tools category describe these tools in detail: