UPDATED 12:00 EDT / OCTOBER 25 2023

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LaunchDarkly’s Galaxy Product Release brings DevOps teams new capabilities

LaunchDarkly, a feature management platform that helps developers and software engineers manage and launch products, today unveiled its Galaxy Product Release that includes a number of updates that will help developers across the entire software development lifecycle from product experimentation to mobile development to release targeting.

The company’s platform gives software development teams the ability to designate certain software features and segment them using “feature flags” that can be used for rolling out features, testing and experimentation. This allows developers, software engineers and DevOps teams to control what features are available for different user audiences and if something goes wrong with a feature, such as a bug, it can be quickly rolled back.

Using LaunchDarkly’s platform, development teams can slowly introduce new features so that their impact on can be monitored. As a result, if something does go wrong it doesn’t affect the entire user base at once. A few of the new capabilities in the Galaxy Product Release directly relate to this capability.

“The DevOps movement created years ago created an entirely new way to build software, yet there are still holes when it comes to the way customers interact with and experience applications today,” said Chief ExecutiveDan Rogers. “With the Galaxy Product Release, LaunchDarkly hopes to provide engineering teams with a North Star that will solve for these gaps.”

With the accelerated pace of software development and the need to roll out features faster, within days instead of months, this often sets up situations where bugs or unexpected interactions can be introduced into software. This led to the introduction of the DevOps movement, where developer teams and information technology operations maintain close communication about monitoring the activity of the application or service.

Now with a Release Assistant, DevOps teams can build predefined, repeatable paths for progressive feature rollouts and this comes alongside a new Release Guardian, which allows for quickly identifying issues and rolling them back.

For migrating between data stores and preventing loss, a new Migration Assistant will reduce the risk of outages, loss and latency and maintain consistency.

Features can also be targeted at specific customer segments using the Segment Builder. For example, if an app developer only wants a particular audience to see parts of their entertainment experience, such as ticket holders, they can do that using the builder. It will even synchronize and manage segments alongside existing data sources. LaunchDarkly also has a Product Experimentation capability, which it is enhancing with Funnel Experiments that allows developers to measure and optimize customer behavior through the app.

Developers will now be able to better manage the lifecycle of mobile releases by separating them from app store processes using a Mobile Release Optimization capability.

LaunchDarkly collaborated with a number of technology companies to enhance integrations with these newly launched capabilities.

Experimentation data from cloud-computing data company Snowflake Inc. will be made available via Snowflake Marketplace, making it easier for developers to build their own analysis of business impact.

“Engineering teams have struggled with measuring and analyzing the business impact of new features,” said Kieran Kennedy, head of Snowflake Marketplace. “Our mutual customers will now have a shared view of where key business metrics intersect with the software features they are testing.”

Twilio Inc. is bringing customer data from its Segment product so that it can be activated to target specific audiences. An integration with error and crash tracking platform Sentry, developers will be able to detect bugs and roll back features before they affect customers. Developers will be able to enable GitHub Actions workflows using the platform to automatically create conditional controls, which will allow them to see which feature flags were changed as part of pull requests, making references to code easier to understand.

Photo: Pixabay

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