LaunchDarkly is looking to bring observability to feature flag management by acquiring Highlight, a provider of an open-source application monitoring tool.
Highlight led the development of a namesake observability that enables the detection, tracking, alerting and analysis of logs and traces in real time, in addition to providing a high-fidelity session replay capability.
LaunchDarkly, meanwhile, has developed a Guarded Releases capability that enables DevOps teams to monitor key metrics while progressively rolling out new features. That capability makes it simpler to catch regressions and automatically roll back releases before updates are deployed.
Company CEO Dan Rogers said that when that capability is integrated into a feature management platform, DevOps teams will gain deeper visibility into the impact any recent changes may have had on an application. That’s critical, because it’s usually the most recent change to an application that has created an issue that might, for example, have resulted in an application suddenly becoming unavailable, he added.
As the number of updates to applications continues to increase in the age of artificial intelligence, DevOps teams are going to require observability capabilities that are embedded within the same platform they are using to manage application releases, noted Rogers. Otherwise, they will soon be overwhelmed by the tsunami of code AI tools are now starting to generate, he added.
DevOps teams have, of course, been to varying degrees to help manage the development of new features since the 1970s. LaunchDarkly provides a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that makes it easier to isolate the development of any given feature into a branch that can be worked on and tested without impacting the entire application.
At the core of that capability are what are known as feature flags, also known as feature toggles or feature switches, that make it possible to dynamically turn services on or off based on who is accessing them. Rather than being limited to the application development process, those feature flags are now being employed in production environments to enable the continuous delivery of multiple types of digital services to various classes of users of an application. A feature flag management platform enables an organization to keep track of all the flags being employed to keep the overall application environment consistent.
That capability provides application development teams with a way to experiment with adding new capabilities in a way that is much less disruptive. When a feature is completed, that branch is then usually merged into the primary build or can be deployed as a microservice.
More recently, however, feature flags are also being used in production environments to make certain capabilities available to a limited number of end users who might be willing to pay extra to access them.
Regardless of motivation, the role feature flags play in DevOps workflows has greatly expanded. The challenge and the opportunity now is to leverage those feature flags to more progressively manage application rollouts and updates in a way that ensures the best end-user experience possible is being consistently provided.
