Gentle deployments mitigate risky releases at AlayaCare

AlayaCare is transforming home and community care with an end-to-end platform that aims to improve patient outcomes. To scale software releases without disrupting critical healthcare service delivery, they've adopted a customer-friendly pace of change approach using LaunchDarkly. By standardizing their deployment strategy into "gentle deployment," AlayaCare categorizes releases as events or non-events and manages triage deployments to minimize disruption. The company has seen significant benefits, including reduced incidents, increased developer productivity, and boosted satisfaction ratings, with results such as a 15% decrease in time spent on coordinating releases and debugging issues. With LaunchDarkly, AlayaCare uses feature flags for better control and flexibility, focusing on parent-child flagging, standalone flags for minor updates, and proactive testing and monitoring. By tracking data and internal stakeholder surveys, the company aims to continue improving their release philosophy and sets a standard for software deployment in the healthcare space that prioritizes speed and safety.