What is the difference between a dark launch and a kill switch?

Dark launches and kill switches both use feature flags to change application behavior at runtime without redeployment, but serve distinct purposes. A dark launch deploys new code while limiting or eliminating user exposure so teams can test it against real production traffic, compare outputs and performance, and gradually expand access before removing the temporary release flag after a successful rollout. A kill switch is a long-lived operational control that lets on-call teams quickly disable a failing feature, integration, or dependency, often falling back to a safer alternative during incidents. The two approaches can complement each other, such as using a dark launch to validate a new search backend and retaining a separate kill switch after release to manage future failures. Recommended practices include assigning owners and expiration dates to release flags, documenting kill switches in operational runbooks, avoiding overly broad parent switches, and using inverted logic and locally cached configurations to preserve safe behavior if the flag service is unavailable.

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