UPDATED 15:30 EDT / DECEMBER 14 2021

CLOUD

LaunchDarkly rides its feature management tech to $3B valuation

Ideas, alongside information, rule the world. LaunchDarkly started in 2014 when cloud-based feature management was a fledgling field.

Today, the company is valued at $3 billion and is No. 47 on the Forbes Cloud 100 list for 2021.

“The worst thing you could do is build something that nobody wants, which is really frustrating,” said Edith Harbaugh (pictured), chief executive officer and co-founder of LaunchDarkly. “We came up with the name feature management just to describe what we were doing, and it was this idea that you could release features to different people at different times.”

Harbaugh spoke with Lisa Martin and David Nicholson, co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during AWS re:Invent. They discussed how LaunchDarkly’s feature management features help organizations stay in control of releases and mitigate disastrous update rollouts. (* Disclosure below.)

A godsend for engineers, designers and product managers?

Organizations today swear by the continuous delivery practice. Code changes are often prepared automatically and then released to production. However, what happens when unforeseen hitches cause bugs, crashes and other undesirable outcomes?

“As an engineer, your mind starts flooding with endorphins and hormones, your heart rate increases and you sometimes make even worse decisions,” Harbaugh explained.

LaunchDarkly allows developers to push features out in waves; and in case of any unwanted outcomes, it can all be undone without a redeploy. If the feature works as intended, its rollout can then be amplified to reach the entire audience.

Another use case for LaunchDarkly’s customers, as identified by Harbaugh, is facilitating their entire move to the cloud.

“TrueCar was running their own data centers, and they wanted a way to start moving all of that data center traffic into AWS,” she said. “They used LaunchDarkly to manage that traffic flow and do it in a controlled way instead of just one quick switch.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent. (* Disclosure: LaunchDarkly sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither LaunchDarkly nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE

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