The feature flag management company LaunchDarkly has announced its Fall 2022 release, with the focus of the new capabilities being to minimize risk and maximize value.
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.
