June 2019 Summaries

LaunchDarkly has decided to rename its client libraries as SDKs, with clear distinctions between server-side and client-side purposes. This change impacts very little for customers, but requires minor actions when updating to the latest versions of their SDKs. The company also announced that it is open-sourcing its SDKs and welcoming contributions from the community.

In May, the Test in Production Meetup was held at Microsoft Reactor in San Francisco, focusing on how the culture of failure impacts teams testing in production. Ben Woskow, Engineering Manager at LaunchDarkly, discussed why failures are not exclusively negative events and how teams can learn from them to improve their products and strengthen as a unit. He emphasized that incidents are inevitable and should be managed responsibly with values such as knowing before customers do, escalating when necessary, recovering quickly, maintaining blamelessness during incidents, and ensuring no repeat of the same incident. Feature flags were highlighted as a powerful tool for resolving incidents without deploying any changes.

In May, a Meetup was held at the Microsoft Reactor in San Francisco focusing on the culture of failure and its impact on testing in production. Ana Medina, Chaos Engineer at Gremlin, spoke about how performing chaos engineering experiments and embracing failure helps engineers build resilience and learn from mistakes. She emphasized that creating a culture that teaches failure is okay can lead to more inclusive environments where everyone can learn together. The event also discussed game days, Takedown Thursdays, postmortem outage reproduction using chaos engineering, and on-call training using chaos engineering as ways to promote the culture of failure and improve resiliency in systems.

When considering a Software as a Service (SaaS) solution, it is crucial to ask questions about security practices, service level agreements (SLAs), and fallback mechanisms in case of service interruptions. Key points include understanding how the provider handles storage of personally identifiable information (PII), conducting regular penetration testing and security audits, obtaining relevant certifications such as SOC-2 and ISO 27001, and having a clear SLA with compensation terms for missed targets. Additionally, it is essential to discuss compatibility with on-premises or internal applications and the benefits of using a SaaS solution over building an in-house alternative.

The blog discusses the newly launched Data Export feature by LaunchDarkly, which provides a real-time feed of feature flag evaluations. This feature is designed for organizations with specific characteristics such as an existing data science team, internal data tools and processes in place, and looking to merge LaunchDarkly data with other sources of information. The blog highlights the benefits of Data Export including experimentation, debugging, and data enhancement. It also mentions that this feature is best used by companies with an existing team of data scientists/analysts/engineers and requires a data warehouse and visualization tools in place.

TrueCar, an automotive marketplace, moved its internet operations off-premises from data centers to the AWS cloud in 2016 due to challenges with legacy codebases and deployments. The company faced operational and logistical challenges when moving hundreds of partner sites and needed a method for developing, testing, and rolling out customer experiences with minimal disruption. TrueCar devised a solution using Amazon Web Services (AWS) Lambda@Edge in CloudFront requests to programmatically switch traffic as needed, creating a scalable, flexible, easy, and fast method for setting up routing rules and modifying traffic flows in near real-time. The implementation also integrated LaunchDarkly's feature flags for A/B testing, allowing business users and application owners to participate in the infrastructure flows and rollout of new platforms.

In this text, the author discusses the importance of embracing Pride Month by incorporating inclusive stickers and designs at conferences and trade shows. They emphasize that showing support for diverse groups can make individuals feel seen and valued, which in turn can lead to increased brand loyalty. The author provides examples of various pride flags and offers resources for those looking to create their own inclusive designs.