A definitive guide to releasing your best software
Farewell to outages, midnight releases, and customer churn
1. Fear and loathing on launch day
For many engineering teams, releases bring tremendous pain, stress, and frustration. Owing to a lack of safeguards, they spend considerable time before a release testing features in pre-production staging environments—often poor imitations of production.
After weeks or months of preparation, the launch day itself is a risky, monumental affair. It’s not uncommon for hundreds of engineering staff to ship a major product update at midnight or over an entire weekend.
These plodding, big-bang releases are bad for business. They’re wildly inefficient. And they stifle innovation, putting you at a competitive disadvantage.
“…with LaunchDarkly, our releases have become unceremonious. Whereas before, we would have waited till the middle of the night to go live, now, we’ll flip a feature flag in the middle of the day. We’ll do a full launch without any fear whatsoever.”
– Jeff Sloyer, Senior Technical Staff Member (STSM), IBM Cloud Kubernetes/OpenShift
Release confidently and consistently…during work hours
LaunchDarkly gives you the safeguards, control, and confidence to release features on-demand. Our platform decouples deployments from releases, meaning developers can deploy features to production as soon as they’re ready but without exposing them to end users.
What’s more, they can progressively deliver features to small subsets of users, thus limiting the blast radius of bugs. Not only that, you can disable a buggy feature within milliseconds of the issue arising.
LaunchDarkly takes things a step further with Release Assistant, a capability that enables you to standardize fast, low-risk releases. With Release Assistant, you can:
- Apply release best practices at scale
Leaders gain peace of mind through automating and standardizing efficient release practices, which include governance and change management controls, across the enterprise. - Use guided paths to release with less effort
With predefined release pipelines, developers can do the next right thing with more confidence and less ad-hoc coordination. - Gain visibility into release statuses
When all of Product Delivery can view every release, it decreases friction for teams coordinating multiple release work streams.
LaunchDarkly transforms releases from being a highly-orchestrated ordeal that you conduct when everyone else is either sleeping or having fun to a forgettable flip of a switch. You can release consistently and confidently, thus fulfilling the first tenet of great software.
Customer success stories: De-risked releases
- IBM enjoys unceremonious releases through progressively delivering new services. Learn about IBM’s success.
- Paramount achieves on-demand releases, improving developer productivity by 100x. Learn about Paramount’s success.
- Northern Trust’s developers went from only 3 deployments per month to 21. Learn about Northern Trust’s success.
