July 2023 Summaries

Co-authored by Ian Damianov and Alex Hardman, this text discusses strategies for shipping code faster while maintaining safety and reducing stress on development teams. It emphasizes the importance of separating deployment from release to manage risks effectively. Feature management is highlighted as a tool that empowers organizations to control who receives new features during the release process. LaunchDarkly's integration with various tools, including Datadog, is mentioned for streamlining the development ecosystem. Observability platforms like Datadog enable informed decisions on whether to continue or rollback feature releases by providing insights into technical and business concerns. The text concludes by encouraging readers to watch a webinar featuring experts Cody De Arkland and Taiji Hagino for more information on these topics.

In a recent webinar, Brian Rinaldi from LaunchDarkly and Welly Siauw from AWS discussed how developers can integrate feature flags into serverless applications to gain granular control over releases. They explained the concept of serverless technology, which allows developers to offload infrastructure management tasks and focus on application code. AWS Lambda, a compute service that enables running application functions without managing servers, was highlighted as part of this strategy. Combining feature flags with AWS Lambda can ensure operational consistency and reduce dependencies when releasing new features. Feature management involves separating the concepts of deployment and release, allowing developers to deploy code to production while wrapped in a flag for controlled activation. This separation minimizes risks associated with releases and enables safer testing in production. By integrating feature management into all layers of an application, serverless computing can improve the overall success of feature flag adoption across the entire application stack.

The text describes a process for migrating databases with zero downtime, drawing an analogy to Indiana Jones' iconic scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark. It outlines three best practices developed by LaunchDarkly during their migration from MongoDB and PostgreSQL to CockroachDB: leveraging production traffic, making migrations gradual and instantly reversible without deploying code changes, and splitting migrations into cohorts. These practices involve using feature flags to control read and write operations between old and new databases, gradually shifting traffic through a 6-stage process, and dividing traffic into different cohorts for testing and optimizing the migration.

The Software Release Summit featured a fireside chat between Honeycomb Field CTO Liz Fong-Jones and LaunchDarkly CTO John Kodumal, discussing industry trends and challenges for engineering leaders. They touched on the need to be cost-conscious in light of macroeconomic challenges, observability and feature management as key tools for high-performing teams, and the potential impact of generative AI on software development. Additionally, they provided advice for companies starting their DevOps journey and highlighted the ROI of observability and feature management tools. Engineering managers were encouraged to identify and address friction points in their developers' workflow to empower them effectively.

The discussion panel at LaunchDarkly's Software Release Summit featured speakers Krista Sappington, VP of IT Application Manager at BOK Financial, and Aaron Kerwin, Director of Software Engineering at Datasite. They discussed their key business initiatives for 2023, including modernizing platforms and improving digital card capabilities at BOK Financial, and delivering software at high speed with low risk at Datasite. Both companies are looking to mature their release practices by tracking metrics that help them understand the impact of their deployments. The panel also touched on using feature management as a safety net for innovation, streamlining releases to reduce stress and prioritize speed, and unlocking more release strategies with LaunchDarkly. The discussion provided valuable insights into how feature management can improve developer experience and productivity, and offered advice for leaders looking to adopt such solutions. The panelists emphasized the importance of understanding current release and deployment processes, identifying pain points, and measuring improvements in production errors and outage times to show the value of changes made. The discussion highlighted the benefits of feature management tools like LaunchDarkly in improving software development and delivery practices.