A definitive guide to releasing your best software

Architectural considerations

At a minimum, a feature management system should support the following:

• Enact flag changes in all environments and applications worldwide immediately—without needing to restart, redeploy, or wait.
• Let you use flags seamlessly and consistently across all your applications and platforms, including server-side, client-side, mobile, etc.
• Provide some kind of fail-safe should your feature management system go down.

From an architecture perspective, supporting even the minimum requirements involves considerable ongoing engineering investments. LaunchDarkly’s architecture delivers the performance, resiliency, and global scale to take care of you when the stakes are the absolute highest.

We provide a global flag delivery network, 26+ SDKs for all major languages and platforms, and a streaming architecture, all of which enables you to:

• Initialize LaunchDarkly within an application in 25ms.
• Enact flag changes across all platforms and environments in 200ms (i.e., release or roll back changes in 200ms).
• Enact flag changes across the world in 200ms via 100+ global points of presence.

Another thing to consider when building a homegrown system is—what happens when your feature flag system goes down? With LaunchDarkly, you don’t have to worry. Our architecture provides several layers of resilience to ensure your systems and clients stay operational at all times, even in the unlikely event of an issue with the LaunchDarkly service.

Security considerations

If your team lacks expertise in security practices, it increases the risk of security vulnerabilities in your homegrown feature management system. 

Whereas, with LaunchDarkly, you can rely on our dedicated security team that provides industry-leading security to a broad customer base (5,000+ customers), including the U.S. Federal Government. We keep up with the latest security threats and ensure LaunchDarkly implements best practices consistently. LaunchDarkly’s security certifications, including ISO 27001 and SOC 2, demonstrate a commitment to meeting strict security and privacy standards. What’s more, LaunchDarkly includes many security features like federated authentication and policy-based authorization that you’d need to build in a comparable homegrown solution.

We operate our data privacy program in accordance with privacy laws including GDPR and CCPA. Finally, LaunchDarkly provides comprehensive privacy and security protections that enable our customers to use our products in compliance with HIPAA and FedRAMP.

The variable costs of a homegrown system

The biggest mistake people make when deciding whether to build a feature management system is they focus too much on the cost of the initial build (fixed) while sorely underestimating the maintenance costs (variable). For many, feature management becomes critical infrastructure. Thus, the initial build is never the end. There is always ongoing work to:

• Maintain
• Troubleshoot
• Secure
• Integrate with changing tools in the stack
• Respond to user requests
• Extend capabilities to additional teams
• Etc.

When building your own system, you are, in effect, making a permanent decision to commit FTEs across several roles to managing that system. Depending on the scale and complexity of your deployment, that can be over $1M/year by itself.