LaunchDarkly Review

Within DevOps, one way to enable more frequent feature updates to clients is to use the method of dark launching.  Dark launching is the process of pushing code to production that disabled off, so users use an in-progress feature. Being able to enable/disable features allows for the developers to test the functionality in a production environment without widely impacting users.

LaunchDarkly has taken this idea and provides a Saas solution that allows for the managing of features via their dashboard. They give you a 30-day trial to test out their service in your application before you purchase a license. You can sign up at https://app.launchdarkly.com/signup.

I will test LaunchDarkly’s service in a small ASP MVC application with RESTful APIs, an AngularJS front end, an Angular 6 front end, and Azure Serverless App. I will create a separate blog entry for each application that I will link from this entry. When complete I will supply my conclusion to the end of this article for future reference.

Project 1 ASP.Net MVC Web API

I used the generated ASP.Net MVC Web API application for my test and added feature flags on the value controller. All tests of the API were performed via PostMan and metrics were captured by Application Insights. Details of the evaluation can be found here. (Link will be updated when published)

Project 2 AngularJs

LaunchDarkly has provided an article on how to leverage their service with AnglurJs here https://launchdarkly.com/blog/implementing-feature-flags-in-an-angular-e-commerce-app/.

Project 3 Angular 

An Angular 4  article is also provided here https://launchdarkly.com/blog/integrating-feature-flags-in-angular-v4/. Since the Angular application under evaluation will be version six, I will use its content for reference.

Project 4 Azure Serverless

Conclusion