Feature management platform for DevOps teams LaunchDarkly has been spending all summer updating its product with new features to give developers the tools they need to manage software capabilities during release.

Big new feature sets for general availability included a new and improved experimentation platform and new frameworks. Enterprise users also received new integrations with Zendesk and Zapier alongside workflow templates.

LaunchDarkly provides a platform that gives software development teams the ability to release new software features gradually to any segment of their user base at scale. It does this through a system called “feature flags” that allows developers to control what features are active for what user segments and when so if something starts to go wrong with a feature, such as a bug, it can be quickly rolled back.

That’s useful for DevOps teams, which combine software development and information technology operations into a single pipeline in order to increase the speed of software and feature deployment. As more features are added to software weekly or daily, with even more complex workflows, it makes it more difficult to understand how features will affect the platform.

In June, LaunchDarkly reached out to its customers and with their feedback developed a new way to run practical experiments regarding feature management. With their help, the company launched a new and improved version of LaunchDarkly Experimentation.

This allows product managers, developers and marketers to conduct front-end, back-end and mobile experiments to understand how it will affect the platform and get actionable insights before going live with a modified feature set. The improved version is now in general availability.

In May, LaunchDarkly expanded its capabilities with privacy features that enable more customers in the healthcare industry who need to be compliant with the Healthcare Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA. These included private attributes that mask sensitive information, a secure mode that verifies software development kit connections, the Relay Proxy that allows customers to control data flows with increased security and approvals to enforce management policies for teams and individuals.

“We’re more than a decade into this DevOps movement and what we’ve seen customers struggling with is how to scale those early successes in engineering transformation,  how to standardize practices, and how to automate where necessary while still remaining compliant with governance standards,” Ravi Tharisayi, senior director of product marketing, told SiliconANGLE in an interview.

That’s how LaunchDarkly seeks to assist DevOps teams to build and automate workflow pipelines at scale, Tharisayi explained, by delivering the tools to make that happen safely.

LaunchDarkly new features for enterprise

For enterprise customers, the release of Workflow Templates allows developer teams to easily scale automated multistep process configurations on a per-flag basis using Workflows. These new templates allow developers to recreate their custom workflow steps more easily again and again, and even vary them, for whatever environment they need.

Flag changes can now also be approved by entire teams – instead of just by individuals – for flag management purposes. In the case of team-based approvals, email and Slack notifications go to the team members for transparency, but the entire team isn’t required to approve for the flag to go live.

Zendesk integration for enterprise customers will allow service tickets to display which feature flags were active in LaunchDarkly so that it’s not necessary to switch applications. Zapier integration now adds more than 5,000 apps to the LaunchDarkly ecosystem, allowing actions that interact with flags to trigger Zapier events.

Enterprise customers will also now be able to easily manage account roles using Okta and LaunchDarkly. Users can import Okta roles and teams directly into LaunchDarkly and have the roles automatically provision, providing consistency between the tools.

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