September 2019 Summaries

In August, Datadog hosted a Test in Production Meetup at the Meetup headquarters in NYC where Corey Bertram discussed how Datadog does chaos engineering. He shared his experiences from when he led the SRE team at Netflix and how that has influenced the way Datadog put process around chaos engineering experiments. The company is moving from a world of game days to experiments, being explicit about what these experiments are, and focusing on safety. They have a hypothesis, method, and rollback for their tests and use tools like Spinnaker and Chaos Toolkit. Datadog's SRE team consists of 15 members globally who focus on building tools that empower other teams to do their job better rather than doing it for them.

LaunchDarkly has introduced SCIM (System for Cross-domain Identity Management) support for two identity providers, Okta and OneLogin. This feature allows administrators to automatically create, manage, and remove user seats when teams change while maintaining secure login processes. The integration of SCIM helps organizations manage users more efficiently and securely by enabling automatic deprovisioning of users as they leave teams, reducing the risk of unauthorized access to restricted services. Users can configure Okta or OneLogin to provision users for LaunchDarkly and manage custom roles. Feedback on user management experiences is welcome through a provided form.

In August, Meetup hosted a Test in Production Meetup at its headquarters in NYC. Lena Krug, VP of Enterprise Technology at Meetup, emphasized the benefits of deploying code early into production. Sebastian Bernheim from Weaveworks shared how Flagger automates canary deployments to Kubernetes. He explained that GitOps uses Git as a single source of truth and showed how automated continuous delivery pipelines, observability, and monitoring simplify the operation of Kubernetes clusters. The event aimed to promote the idea that testing environments are no longer needed and encourage more companies to adopt this best practice in enterprise software development.

LaunchDarkly has released its SDK for Xamarin, promoting it to general availability. This allows more software teams to use the platform, which supports cross-platform development of iOS, Android, and Windows applications using C#. The Xamarin SDK reference guide provides information on getting started, while support is available at [email protected]. LaunchDarkly also offers SDKs for React Native, iOS, Android, native desktop applications, server-side applications in C#, and more.

LaunchDarkly and Pendo have integrated their services to provide users with more personalized experiences. Developers can use feature flags in LaunchDarkly to control how users interact with applications, while Pendo offers insights, feedback, and engagement tools for product teams. The integration allows users to define a user segment in Pendo and leverage it in LaunchDarkly for targeted feature flagging. This collaboration aims to create seamless engagement strategies from code to user interaction, improving the overall user experience.

At a recent Test in Production Meetup, experts discussed the importance of testing new software features in production and how service meshes and feature flags differ. They also touched on planning for failure and tailoring feature rollouts to best suit customers' change tolerance. The discussion highlighted the shift from traditional enterprise models with low trust and siloed operations to more adaptive and learning-oriented approaches, emphasizing the need for continuous feedback loops and experimentation in software development.

LaunchDarkly has released a Slack app that integrates with the workspace, allowing users to view, monitor, and interact with feature flags directly from their regular channels. The app helps teams collaborate on flags by filtering and viewing them within the workspace, subscribing to flag updates in relevant project channels, and receiving notifications for any changes. Users can subscribe to a set of flags or individual flags, making it easier to track and manage feature flags across different projects. The Slack app also enables users to toggle flag targeting on and off from within Slack, saving time for simple flags. To use the app, visit the Slack directory and read the documentation for more details.