First, custom contexts are now generally available for all LaunchDarkly customers. With this, organizations are enabled to create several target objects which can map to a business’s use case.

This provides users with the ability to deliver targeting how they want as well as offers improved control and business alignment for how features are delivered. 

The release of custom contexts also allows for multiple new use cases for LaunchDarkly Experimentation customers, such as the ability to create rules and build experimentation audiences based on different context types. 

In addition, the possibility to randomize experiments on known variables such as device type, browser type, and more, has been expanded. According to LaunchDarkly, this keeps the experiment stable as well as eliminates randomization discrepancies that result from traditional user targeting.

Next, an approvals dashboard has been released in order to assist users in tracking and managing approvals so that they can visualize all approvals in one single dashboard with options to sort and filter by. These options include necessary approver, approval requester, project status, and approval status.

The company has also updated its notification settings, allowing users to control what notifications they would like to receive, such as flag updates or approvals, and how they would like to receive them. 

Furthermore, LaunchDarkly announced a native integration with Microsoft Teams. This enables users to receive personal flag update notifications in real-time, associate chat messages with a flag via flag links, create and subscribe to channels that push flag update notifications, and get notified of approval requests right from within Microsoft Teams.

New RUM integrations for Datadog and AWS users are also available so that Datadog customers can now improve their RUM data with feature flag data from LaunchDarkly.

The team stated that this integration offers users better visibility into which flag variations end-users are experiencing and the impact that those variations have on overall engagement and application performance.

LaunchDarkly also added support for SCIM user and role provisioning in order to enhance the LaunchDarkly and Azure AD SSO integration. With this, users gain more control over provisioning with the real-time updates that SCIM offers, such as automatic de-provisioning.

Identifying flag owners has also been simplified with the addition of the ability to assign a flag maintainer. This allows for the filtering of the flag dashboard to flags maintained by teams, and further promotes flag accountability.

Dark theme is also now generally available in LaunchDarkly as an additional customization option. 

Lastly, the company has reached fedRAMP authorization. With this, government agencies and their commercial partners can utilize the Federal instance of LaunchDarkly’s feature management platform to deliver software and modernize applications with improved control.

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It has added a number of new features to Feature Workflows, which is a set of capabilities for automating elements of the software release process. 

Customers will now be able to automatically disable feature flags during maintenance windows. Previously, they would have had to manually turn them off before doing maintenance. 

Updates to the Approvals feature, which lets the appropriate people review and approve changes to code, include updates to the Slack notification to add more information and the ability to complete flag change reviews from Slack. They also plan to release an approvals dashboard in a future update. The dashboard will let customers see and manage change requests across their organization. 

It also added a number of new capabilities to the Experimentation service, which lets customers run experiments and increase the value of their offerings.

Customers can now visualize results of experiments and see the lower and upper bounds of a result. According to LaunchDarkly, this will help customers make better decisions when working with complex datasets. 

A new sample ratio mismatch (SRM) test feature will tell customers whether or not they have a mismatch between the expected and actual results. 

And finally, the new Metric Import API reduces manual effort when importing from other data sources. 

Updates to the core flagging platform have also been made. Flag defaults can now be set to speed up flag creation, reduce uncertainty, and reduce risk, by reusing configurations across multiple projects. 

A new Helm Chart will cut down on work when using Relay Proxy and Kubernetes, which is used to limit outbound connections to LaunchDarkly, limit redundant database traffic, and work with large segments. 

A new and improved integration with Cloudflare will let customers evaluate flags at the network edge of their organization, rather than LaunchDarkly’s network edge. According to Cloudflare, this unlocks greater flag evaluation speeds. 

And finally, the company has updated its teams feature with new capabilities like the ability to assign teams as flag maintainers, assign users or groups to LaunchDarkly from their identity provider, and manage teams in Terraform. 

Looking forward, the company shared some insight into what’s next for upcoming features. It plans to build out custom contexts to enable teams to not only deliver software to users, but to contexts like devices, organizations, geographies, facilities, stores, and more. 

LaunchDarkly will also launch a new offering called Accelerate, which will enable customers to track key engineering metrics like deployment frequency, release frequency, lead time for code changes, and flag coverage.

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Back in June, LaunchDarkly released the new LaunchDarkly Experimentation, a better way to run practical and meaningful experiments. 

According to the company, the experimentation platform is intended to deliver fast, actionable experimentation feedback cycles by integrating into existing workflows. This works to allow actionable experimentation with a democratized setup. 

The client-side SDK for Vue is also now generally available, bringing users the ability to utilize LaunchDarkly feature flags on applications built with the framework. 

This summer, the company also announced the expansion of its commitment to healthcare customers looking to satisfy Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act requirements. According to LaunchDarkly, this will further help to keep healthcare customer information private by never requiring any personal identifiable information.

Additionally, Workflow Templates was released, allowing users to scale out Workflows across several flags across environments and projects. 

Users can also now request approvals for flag changes from a team. When approval is requested for a team, email, and slack notifications are sent to all team members for visibility and transparency but approval application requirements are based on the environment setting.

The company has also announced an integration with Zendesk in order to allow team members to view feature flags variation information for a user directly from within the Zendesk ticket. The integration then extracts the correct information from LaunchDarkly without requiring the user to switch applications. 

Another new integration is with Zapier. This works with any of Zapier’s 5000+ applications without the need to build custom solutions from scratch.

Lastly, LaunchDarkly now allows for syncing groups from Okta teams within the user’s account. According to the company, this feature can be used to create a new team or link an existing team with the same name to an Okta group. 

To learn more, visit the website.

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With this, development teams gain access to enterprise-grade feature flagging capabilities, advancing the technique of progressive delivery within modern software engineering.

This release allows teams of up to 15 developers to take advantage of feature flags at scale, working to tackle common challenges such as technical debt and governance issues. 

CloudBees Feature Management Community Edition brings users several features, such as flag approvals, flag lifecycling, a real proxy, webhooks, audit logs, flag scheduling, and full access to all of the software development kits available from CloudBees.

Additionally, this extension offers 250,000 client-side monthly active users and 100 million impressions per month. 

The Community Edition also integrates with Jenkins and the CloudBees platform to achieve greater visibility of feature flags across continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines. 

“Using feature flags to deliver software progressively is no longer a fringe concept for enterprise companies, even those in highly regulated industries. Our obsession with developer experience drove the decision to enable development teams with access to our enterprise-grade feature flag management system for free,” said Jim Schuchart, general manager of feature management at CloudBees. “We believe CloudBees Feature Management Community Edition truly sets CloudBees apart from any other free edition in the market because it is so full-featured and robust.”

To get started using CloudBees Feature Management Community Edition, see here. For more information, click here.

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CloudBees Feature Management now provides full visibility into feature flags throughout development and release pipelines. This allows companies to more efficiently scale their use of feature flags. 

The platform now integrates with Jenkins, allowing developers to see their flags in the build pipeline. According to CloudBees, feature flag management has traditionally been separate from CI, which led to inefficiencies. Now, Jenkins users will be able to create, delete, or update a flag within a CI job. 

“In order for feature management to be scaled effectively across enterprises, it cannot operate in a silo separate from the tools used for CI and CD,” said Dinesh Keswani, chief technology officer of CloudBees. “There must be common visibility and governance of feature flags throughout the software delivery lifecycle. These new enhancements lay the foundation for fully integrated feature flags across the CloudBees Platform, enabling enterprise-scale progressive delivery, especially for our customers with highly complex environments.”

The company also announced CloudBees Compliance, which provides compliance and risk analysis throughout the development lifecycle.

The solution can assess compliance of code, binary artifacts, data, identity, and infrastructure environments. It also provides developers with actionable feedback so that they can resolve compliance issues quickly. 

It uses a common repository of rules in its assessments, and also deduplicates alerts to eliminate double alerting. Teams can also set custom thresholds based on their acceptable risk level. 

CloudBees Compliance is expected to be generally available in the first quarter of 2022. 

“Shifting left is not enough for enterprises that are highly regulated, highly complex and operating at extraordinary scale,” said Stephen DeWitt, CEO of CloudBees. “Putting code into production that doesn’t work, whatever the reason, isn’t a viable option – the risks and costs are just too high. What enterprises want and need is immediate and actionable feedback at every point of the software delivery lifecycle so that they have the peace of mind of being compliant at all times, all while enabling developers to focus on creating business value. CloudBees Compliance lets developers focus on writing code, lets security and compliance teams ‘set it and forget it,’ and lets CISOs sleep better at night knowing risk is constantly assessed and issues are identified and routed immediately to be addressed.”

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With Statuses, teams can assign a feature the stage — in testing, for example — it is at in the release process. This, according to the company, saves the time of having to dig into its configuration when checking the status for any flag or experiment. 

The Rollout board visualizes the release process by status; whenever a feature flag has a status assigned to it, the flag will automatically appear in the board. This allows teams to know what to do next so that they never forget to update or remove a feature flag. Here, the team can access information such as the number of days since a status was last updated, traffic received across environments, and outstanding alert notifications and approval requests. 

When teams are managing a number of releases at once, Statuses and Rollout board can help streamline feature delivery. This allows for flags to be kept up to date while quickly determining the right next steps for any given feature. This new product update also allows release teams to easily manage and collaborate on different feature flags and experiments all from the same location. On top of this, Statuses and Rollout board help to reduce technical debt by safely and promptly retiring feature flags once the features are fully released. This prevents unused flags from piling up in the code base.

Statuses and Rollout board also work to expand the Split Platform’s governance capabilities, ensuring security, and compliance throughout the feature delivery life cycle. This allows developers to stay informed and get peer feedback with approval flows as different features make it to production, are tested on internal teams, and finally released to real users. 

As flags and experiments multiply, Statuses and Rollout board can help teams keep track and make sure releases stay on schedule. In addition, the teams will be notified of any approval requests or alert notifications that come about to ensure they receive the proper attention.  

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The control plane provides a new managed cloud UI and an integrated toolchain built entirely on top of Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) open-source projects. 

Developers can use the control plane to view and manage their organization’s apps and services across development, deployment, and production environments without needing to stitch together Kubernetes tools or needing to compromise productivity. 

Ambassador Labs also unveiled two new developer programs that are designed to elevate hands-on learning with Kubernetes: Summer of Kubernetes and the Ambassador Community Advocate program.

“Kubernetes has become an industry-standard and organizations are now faced with a dizzying ecosystem of cloud native open source tools. To deal with increasingly complex tool sprawl, companies have resorted to gluing together various homegrown systems to improve the Kubernetes developer experience,” said Richard Li, the CEO and founder of Ambassador Labs. “A modern developer control plane is necessary to accelerate Kubernetes adoption with less complexity and our mission is to put one in the hands of every developer and at the heart of every organization.” 

DCP is now available as a managed solution that integrates the Service Catalog, source control, Kubernetes and key CNCF technologies in a new UI.

Also, Telepresence now runs in more places with support for container-based continuous integration systems, macOS and Linux. 

The new platform can also be used to manage canary releases to quickly and safely ship updates since DCP is powered by the open-source project Argo and can integrate into existing GitOps workflows. 

Contributors to Emissary-ingress, a CNCF Incubation project, now benefit from an overhauled contribution, release, and testing process, according to the company in a post that contains additional details. 

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A lot of these companies think there’s a dichotomy between whether you can move fast or increase value. 

“I think the move fast and break things got a bad rap. It’s kind of horrifying to think, Hey, a developer that I’m not even talking to could suddenly blow up my entire customer base without all these gates,” said Edith Harbaugh, the CEO of LaunchDarkly, during a recent SD Times Live! tech talk.

However, releasing slower today could actually make the software more unsafe, according to Harbaugh.

“If you’re doing the old software releases of 20 years ago where you do a release every year, every release has so much heft, weight and gravity behind it,” said Harbaugh.

Not only are the releases heavy in technical complexity, requiring developers to check all of these different branches and features, but they are also risky from a business perspective because the value that was planned a year ago might not even be relevant anymore. This could cause a large release to flop when out in the field. 

With the proper distributed architectures and guardrails that limit the blast radius, both speed and value are mutually possible. 

One such method for safer deployments is canary deployments, which can limit the blast radius from 100% of the user base and have it down to where it maybe affects 1% of the most progressive users. 

Canaries are typically an engineering activity and feature flags – which are a core part of this activity – help unlock value way up in the stack, according to DROdio, the CEO of Armory.

“You have to have the seatbelt on before you want to drive the Ferrari fast. The company has to have that psychological safety to be able to flip that cost-benefit analysis in their heads that it is worth deploying out to that 1% of the population so you can deploy 10 or 100x faster,” DROdio said.

Also, distributed architectures such microservices, serverless, Docker or Kubernetes limit the blast radius so that any one change becomes is a lot less risky.  

Once the mindset of an organization is changed to be able to validate changes, get more into production and get real usage in, releasing at cadences of up to even multiple times a day gets a lot less terrifying, according to Joe Duffy, the CEO of Pulumi.

Another benefit of a faster production cycle is that developers will also get quick feedback on all the features that they are working on and have more incentive to constantly interact with that feature’s code. 

“I think of developers as artists. They have code and they want to get their code out into the world and they want to learn from that code as quickly as possible so that they can have an iterative cycle,” DROdio said. “I don’t know that executives often understand that there’s anything more soul-sucking for a developer than having code sit on the shelf for a month or a quarter and it makes the best developers not want to work at companies that have that lack of sophistication.”

Listen to the full tech talk here.

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Harness’s new test intelligence feature reduces test cycle time by up to 98% by using AI/ML workflows to prioritize and optimize test execution without compromising quality. The new capabilities shift failed tests earlier into the build cycle so that developers can quickly find out if a fix worked. 

The new feature flag capabilities enable developers to release new features without making them visible to users. It also makes it easier to try capabilities such as A/B testing or software functionality variations like one- or two-step checkout. 

Developers currently use multiple toolsets and pipelines for software delivery, which limits their velocity, productivity and deployment frequency due to context switching, and babysitting configuration and upgrades which introduces toil for developers. The new Unified Pipeline enables them to manage all aspects of software delivery from a single tool, the company explained.

Harness also integrated its acquisition of Lightwing technology into its Cloud Cost Management module to enable engineering teams to auto-stop and restart their non-production environments within seconds. 

“Significant costs and many hours are incurred daily as engineering teams continuously build, test and deploy software,” said Jyoti Bansal, the CEO and cofounder of Harness. “The new Harness platform gives developers the only pipeline they’ll need. Customers can now do it all from one platform—so they can ultimately deliver software at scale quickly, reliably and securely.”

Additional details on the expanded capabilities within Harness’ platform are available here.

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“Historically, you’d deploy a new version of software and everybody would see it. For a lot of reasons, this ends up being less than optimal,” said John Kodumal, CTO and co-founder of LaunchDarkly, a feature flag management company. “One of the biggest reasons is risk because if there’s a problem, error or suboptimal behavior, that’s going to be exposed to your entire user base.”

What Is Progressive Delivery?

Progressive Delivery refines the release step, separating it from deployment so the potential damage caused by a bug or poor application design can be limited to a much smaller user base than the entire population. What’s more, teams can decide just how granular they want the level of control to be. 

Regardless of how granular they choose to get, the concept is the same: start small and then roll out to progressively larger cohorts. That way, the impact of a change can be assessed before it becomes a liability.

RELATED CONTENT: Progressive delivery: Testing software through limited releases

“The two core ideas driving Progressive Delivery are release progression and delegation,” said Kodumal. “Release progression allows you to adjust the number of users and what they are able to see. Delegation progressively delegates the control of a feature to the owner who is most responsible for an outcome.”

For example:

• Developers can decouple deploys from releases and test in production
• Data scientists can experiment and run A/B tests
• Sales and customer success can ensure appropriate entitlement and manage plans
• Operations can invoke kill switches and safety valves
• Security can ensure role-based access control and compliance
• Product owners can do dark launches and beta testing
• Marketing can synchronize launches and target markets

There are two ways to affect Progressive Delivery: using feature flags or canary deployments.

“With feature flags, you can observe a change over a longer period of time and compartmentalize the change. Feature flags also provide the smallest level of granularity such as an individual commit, an individual developer’s work or the most engaged customers,” said Kodumal. “Canary releases are really just the aggregation of all the changes from the last deployment to the new deployment, but with either mechanism, you can do something as simple as a percentage rollout.”

Feature management is essential to achieve Progressive Delivery because canary releases alone can be too constraining. It’s almost impossible to do several canary releases simultaneously, but with feature management, changes can be segregated at any level of granularity, such as squad-based, team member-based, or commit-based, for example. The isolated changes can then be measured independently.

“Feature management essentially gives you the benefit of a canary process, but on a per-change basis as opposed to a per-deploy basis,” said Kodumal. “It gives you more ability to parallelize more availability in a bigger team and pinpoint what changes connect to a positive or negative impact.”

With a canary release, it also may not be possible to identify the cause of a negative impact. However, if the change is guarded by a feature flag, then the feature flag can simply be turned off with the rest of the deployment kept live. Organizations with hundreds of engineers working in parallel find the level of precision greatly beneficial because they can control releases, very precisely, without adding an unwieldy level of complexity that’s hard to manage. Product quality also tends to improve.

Continuous Delivery and Progressive Delivery Go Hand in Hand

Many organizations have adopted CI/CD for competitiveness reasons. Typically, their industry has been disrupted by cloud-native companies that deliver software orders of magnitude faster. In fact, elite companies ship software 106 times faster and their applications fail seven times less often than slower-moving companies. They’re also doing 208 times more code deployments and can recover from incidents 2,604 times faster. 

While continuous deployment remains out of reach for most organizations, they’re still able to hone their DevOps practices and CI/CD pipelines. Progressive Delivery is simply the next step.

In fact, Continuous Delivery and Progressive Delivery are not mutually exclusive. Continuous Delivery accelerates release frequency and it can help improve product quality. However, in the absence of Progressive Delivery, Continuous Delivery can’t guarantee that the most recent updates will resonate with customers.

“Most people think of Continuous Delivery as the steps up to deployment. Progressive Delivery expands the life cycle by allowing you to minimize changes and react quickly to change beyond the deployment phase and into the runtime phase,” said Kodumal. “Continuous Delivery allows you to achieve a faster cycle time to production by reducing the size of changes that are pushed to production. Progressive Delivery is a dynamic version of that.”

In fact, the organizations that are in the best position to take advantage of Progressive Delivery are those that are already doing Continuous Delivery, but it isn’t an absolute requirement. For example, if an organization releases software every quarter, they can minimize the risk associated with code changes if the changes are protected by feature flags.

“Regardless of where teams are in their journey, they all tend to want the same thing,” said Kodumal. “They want to deploy when they want and release when their customers are ready.”

Adding Progressive Delivery to Continuous Delivery enables teams to push a change to production quickly and measure the impacts of that change right away. The rapid feedback cycles allow teams to have more confidence in the changes they’re making.

Benefits of Progressive Delivery

A surprising benefit of Progressive Delivery is that it enables teams who have not adopted CI/CD yet to adopt it safely. Progressive Delivery also enables DevOps because it provides collaborative capabilities and helps increase release velocity without interfering with system reliability.

“When software teams adopt DevOps and CI/CD, they often see the speed benefit, but they’re less confident about code quality, user perceptions and whether they’ve done enough to minimize the risk of security vulnerabilities,” said Kodumal. “Progressive Delivery enables you deploy new code faster and with an unprecedented level of confidence because it gives you the safeguards you need to minimize risk potential.”

Risk is the main reason why highly regulated companies have been slow to adopt even Agile practices, let alone DevOps or CI/CD. They want assurances that if their release velocity increases, the price of that speed won’t be incidents, outages, lawsuits or regulatory fines. Using Progressive Delivery, they’re able to limit risk exposure in a manner that’s auditable while delivering value faster to customers. 

The operative word when it comes to Progressive Delivery is control. Using feature flags, organizations can control:

• Which capabilities groups or even individual users can access and experience
• When those changes are delivered to different customers
• Who can release features
• The impact of less-than-optimal code

In fact, Microsoft reduces its launch risks using ring deployments, which is a Progressive Delivery technique. Specifically, it starts with a core group (which is actually a canary deployment). If the deployment meets the target performance criteria, then it moves to the next ring, which involves more users, and so on.

GitHub starts with “staff ships,” which are also canary deployments. That way if a deployment misses the mark, it can be fixed before any customers see it. If the deployment is successful, then the rollout continues among customers.

Software teams deploying microservices applications to Kubernetes clusters can take advantage of Progressive Delivery using service meshes or feature management. If using a service mesh, the process starts with a blue-green deployment in which an old version of the software and a new version of the software run on separate servers. The service mesh runs a canary test by routing a subset of users to the new application and the rest of the users to the old application. If the canary test fails, then all traffic is routed to the old version. Feature management provides more control.

The Best Way to Adopt Progressive Delivery

Feature flagging software is readily available, but as with any tool, the results depend on a combination of people, processes and tools.

“If you’re in the planning phase of a Progressive Delivery practice, make sure it’s a collaborative exercise with the team,” said Kodumal. “Your PM, your designer, your engineering – collectively the trio that is in charge of delivering a new change or a new piece of functionality – should talk about how to expose that feature to users.”

For example, they might decide to roll a change out gradually over a 10-day period in 5% increments on a daily basis. If any of the metrics indicate a negative impact, then the change could simply be rolled back.

Alternatively, if the situation involves a rebrand or other initiative involving non-software assets such as documentation or a marketing site, they might choose a rollout strategy.

“You want to bring culture and process change thinking into your planning phase so you’re clear about why you’re releasing a change and what would be considered a positive impact. You also want to consider the metrics so you can understand whether the release is working the way you expect it to,” said Kodumal. “A feature management tool enables you to do all that quickly and efficiently.”

As with many things, teams can decide whether to use open-source tools, build their own tool or license a tool from a company such as LaunchDarkly. The teams using open source or homegrown tools tend to discover they need enterprise capabilities such as a collaboration layer, security and permissions.

“Ultimately, Progressive Delivery software controls how users experience your product, what features they’re seeing and what features they’re not seeing. It’s a mission critical piece of your stack,” said Kodumal. 

Transform Your Application Portfolio

Companies that have become adept at Progressive Delivery aren’t just using feature flags to minimize risks. They’re also using it as a means of controlling software over the long term. That way, they can have one codebase that delivers multiple product experiences.

For example, companies offering different subscription or on-premises product levels might have gold, silver, and bronze plans, each of which offers different functionality or capabilities that can easily be controlled using feature flags. Without feature flags, there may be multiple code branches or arcane controls that determine what an individual user sees.

“Customers are now running longer-term experiments, doing A/B testing, optimization and personalization. It’s amazing how many capabilities you can unlock once you have a good feature management practice in place,” said Kodumal. “Once you begin to practice feature management, it fundamentally transforms the way you build software for the better.”

Learn more at www.launchdarkly.com.

Content provided by SD Times and LaunchDarkly

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