Tame the Dragon and Other Release Management Lessons

Releases can be challenging and even scary, especially as companies scale. LaunchDarkly aims to make releases uneventful by transforming them into something more like watching paint dry. To achieve this, they suggest going slowly and sneaking around, waiting for safety, and exploring easier caves first. However, these approaches add friction and hinder agility. Instead, using feature flags can mitigate the effects of a failed release without impacting users. Automating complex rollouts allows teams to explore more sophisticated strategies and control releases step by step. Parent-child feature flags, progressive rollouts, scheduled maintenance windows, and custom workflows are some strategies that LaunchDarkly customers use for fine-grained control over their releases. Chronosphere uses LaunchDarkly to manage complex release programs, separating business decisions from engineering ones.