The feature flag company LaunchDarkly has announced a number of new additions to its platform that will help developers “ship at the speed of now.” These announcements were unveiled at LaunchDarkly’s annual user conference, Galaxy ‘24, happening today and tomorrow in San Francisco.
First, the company announced several user experience updates, such as improved navigation, multi-environment views, dashboard shortcuts, and the ability to track changes for all resources.
Additionally, to enable smoother releases, the company announced Release Assistant, which helps standardize and automate aspects of the software release process. It enables users to create and manage their release pipelines, define audiences for each release phase, control approval and requirements, and automate rollouts.
It also announced a new LaunchDarkly CLI where developers can work in their development environments, documentation, and GUI without switching between them, and an extension for GitHub Copilot that allows users to create flags, get summaries about them, and check the status of flag cleanup.
Next, the company announced Release Guardian, which enables teams to identify and fix software issues before they make it into production. It integrates with popular monitoring and security tools, such as Sentry, Segment, and OpenTelemetry, and enables teams to correlate issues with specific releases.
“Releasing software involves a delicate balance between speed and risk mitigation. Teams often must choose between speed and safety. With LaunchDarkly’s Release Guardian, you no longer have to make this trade-off. Release Guardian enables you to monitor the impact of your releases in real-time, ensuring swift issue detection and mitigation,” Claire Vo, chief product officer at LaunchDarkly, wrote in a blog post.
Another new feature is Advanced Experimentation, which allows development teams to measure the business impact of features and releases and conduct experiments to test potential new features.
“What good is it to ship features continuously if they fail to have the intended business impact? That’s why LaunchDarkly combines feature management and experimentation into a unified solution and empowers teams to integrate experimentation right into their release process,” Vo wrote.
And finally, the company unveiled new AI features such as AI Prompt and Model Templates, an AI Variation Builder, and a GenAI Experiment Builder.
“AI has become a top priority for development teams. But AI development comes with a host of challenges: process failures, model conflicts, a lack of performance measurement, etc. Fortunately, with LaunchDarkly, teams gain runtime control over configurations, iterate with live user feedback, and seamlessly integrate generative AI flag templates to ensure confident, measurable, and impactful AI releases—all within a single unified workflow,” Vo wrote.
