Kill (switch) your homegrown flagging solution

When you have a platform that empowers developers and the overall business to release new features faster and more efficiently than ever, it changes everything. Here’s what we mean.

Increased developer productivity

Your development team’s main focus should be on raising the quality of the products you’re selling, not continuously delivering life support to an internally-created engineering solution that was never built for the growing demands being placed on it. Beyond that, when each developer in your organization is personally responsible for writing their own feature flags or toggles, you end up with disjointed code and a heap of technical debt.

Life with LaunchDarkly: Not only will your teams never have to give a thought to maintaining our platform or adding new features, but they’ll also significantly reduce the toil associated with managing the tech debt of feature flags. LaunchDarkly’s flag status indicators will save your teams’ hours of time by proactively indicating when and the exact line of code that needs to be updated.

Customer proof: Paramount, the leading global media company—which counts brand names like Showtime, Paramount+, MTV, Nickelodeon, BET, and Comedy Central in its portfolio—went from deploying twice a month to 7 times a day with LaunchDarkly.

Enterprise-ready service

Enterprises take security and privacy extremely seriously, and so does LaunchDarkly. Feature flags are essential tools to granularly-control software releases, but you need to make sure that every team member has the exact permissions they need: no more, no less. Homegrown tools often don’t, or simply can’t, account for things like permissions, audit logs, and roles.

Life with LaunchDarkly: For every project, we provide built-in roles with different permissions, as well as the ability to create your own custom roles. Plus, our “teams” feature gives account admins the ability to group members into teams to better reflect your organizational structure within LaunchDarkly.

Customer proof: Northern Trust, a global bank that’s been operating since 1910, reduced its cycle time to around 10 days and went from 2-3 deployments per month to 21.

Cross-team functionality and insights

At some point, there’s going to be interest from the business in either creating feature flags, monitoring the performance of product releases, or both. Without a feature management platform like LaunchDarkly, every request to start, stop, or modify a feature tied to a flag will necessitate a pull request and additional engineering time. This leads to silos and bottlenecks that hinder the performance of your team and application. Plus, if you’re running a homegrown feature flag system, getting that data to the appropriate parties wouldn’t be possible without adding yet another tool on top of your internal solution.

Life with LaunchDarkly: Metrics, dashboards, and an intuitive UI allow all stakeholders to visualize and access mission-critical features. LaunchDarkly supports role-based access control, and a growing list of integrations for multiple teams.

Customer receipt: When Intuit—a technology company that develops financial management solutions for approximately 50 million customers—switched to LaunchDarkly from a homegrown system, it was able to cut its time for flag changes from ten minutes to nearly instantaneous. Additionally, when the Intuit data science team wanted to test an idea with live users, engineers were easily able to present the test option to 45,000 users so they could run their experiment.

Zach Ozer
VP Engineering - Shortcut

Features internal teams can't produce

If you have a homegrown feature flagging solution up-and-running, you'll note these features are probably missing:

• Advanced targeting
  Get faster, more controlled feedback by rolling out flag variations to a percentage of users, targeting specific users with flag rules, and adding user details to flag evaluation code— all challenges or impossibilities with your current system.
• Feature workflows
  Instead of manually creating each feature flag from scratch, use Scheduling, Approvals, and Flag Triggers to automate safe, multistep rollouts, and trigger rollbacks in 200ms if there's an error through LaunchDarkly's streaming architecture.
• Experimentation
  With built-in testing capabilities, LaunchDarkly allows you to run not only standard A/B/n tests, but also painted door, multi-armed bandits, non-negative, and champion-versus-challenger tests.
• Comprehensive analytics
  With LaunchDarkly, your teams can visualize and understand trends, audit changes, and improve conversions without any additional tools or frameworks.
• Kill switches
  Instead of anxiously waiting 5-10 minutes for your features to deploy, imagine changes happening within 0.2 seconds, and being able to rollback when there's an issue.

And if you're wondering about reliability, LaunchDarkly's architecture offers several layers of redundancy to ensure service and flag availability including multiple availability zones and 100s of points of presence across the globe through our content delivery network.