Introduction to Feature Flagging using Launch Darkly
Applications with features continuously evolve. Modern SaaS based applications are multi-tenant and always have a frequent release cycle. But a big bang release of all features in production for all customers simultaneously is not the preferred approach.
Identifying the market pulse and early feedback are important for any product. To support these scenarios, DevOps provides capabilities like the canary releases model. Feature flags also support this model by providing an alternative way of enabling or disabling a feature based on certain conditions. But sometimes switching on/off a feature may not be that simple, and the product team might want to enable/disable a feature based on several parameters and contextual information.
Product teams usually build custom solutions to support these capabilities. But leveraging a centralized system that can help a rule-based evaluation model for feature flagging in different environments must be considered.
This article discusses one of the leading services in this aspect - LaunchDarkly.
