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If anyone from LaunchDarkly is reading: any plans to add Elixir?
We've used LaunchDarkly (LD) for about a year now. We previously used our own Feature Flag library built by our CTO: https://www.npmjs.com/package/dipswitch . LD provided a lot more, and continues to release new features that would've been much more expensive for us to build vs. buy here. We’ve been so pleased w/ LD that we agreed to do a case study with them if you want to take a gander: https://launchdarkly.com/cas…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pretty much. The issue now is, can I implement feature flags faster than I can implement the LaunchDarkly API? I think I can do feature flags faster.
Can you implement analytics on top of those flags, plus a nice UI for nontechnical employees to toggle them faster? If you don't need those, then you probably aren't in their target audience. Disclaimer: no relation, just playing devil's advocate.
If anyone from LaunchDarkly is reading: any plans to add Elixir?
It's not on our immediate roadmap, but we have had some demand for it. We think we might go about it by building an Erlang SDK. Hopefully a light wrapper on that would work well from the Elixir side.
Interesting idea but how defensible is this business? Somebody releases an open source version, what is the selling point here?
The biggest challenge in implementing this is handling scale. To be able to do feature flagging for the largest web products you need to be able to handle the scale of those products. Any of us could build this ourselves in a few minutes for a local app, but to scale up to millions of users is very tough.
We've used LaunchDarkly (LD) for about a year now. We previously used our own Feature Flag library built by our CTO: https://www.npmjs.com/package/dipswitch . LD provided a lot more, and continues to release new features that would've been much more expensive for us to build vs. buy here. We’ve been so pleased w/ LD that we agreed to do a case study with them if you want to take a gander: https://launchdarkly.com/cas…
we implemented most of LD in a 24-hour quarterly hackathon we hold
What's the breakdown of 'most' vs the remaining? 80/20? Alternatively, if 'most' was implemented in 24 hours, how long would it take to implement the rest?
From these two statements, I get the impression that either
(1) LD is cheap to buy to begin
(2) 'most' should be taken with a dash of salt
We've used LaunchDarkly (LD) for about a year now. We previously used our own Feature Flag library built by our CTO: https://www.npmjs.com/package/dipswitch . LD provided a lot more, and continues to release new features that would've been much more expensive for us to build vs. buy here. We’ve been so pleased w/ LD that we agreed to do a case study with them if you want to take a gander: https://launchdarkly.com/cas…
we implemented most of LD in a 24-hour quarterly hackathon we hold
What's the breakdown of 'most' vs the remaining? 80/20? Alternatively, if 'most' was implemented in 24 hours, how long would it take to implement the rest?
From these two statements, I get the impression that either
(1) LD is cheap to buy to begin (2) 'most' should be taken with a dash of salt
Interesting idea but how defensible is this business? Somebody releases an open source version, what is the selling point here?
I'm working on that. Currently we are using LD but it's had some issues, enough that their CEO sent email and refunded some of our money. As far as Scale is concerned we routinely see request timeout to LD and then suddenly a user loses a FF they previously had. Our cached value for the FF expires and then LD fails and then my customer is mad
Please do post it, I'd love to help out anyway I can.
Here are a few key benefits I've seen as an avid user of LaunchDarkly, that are end up costing a lot to build on your own:
- ability to have people outside of engineering control who gets access to what features. Specifically, product management should have control over what features are available, and they probably don't want to go into a dev console to make the changes. Sure, you could build a UI on top of home grown FFs, but why spend valuable time on this?
- rules-based user targeting -- rather than embedding ugly logic into your code about what type of user should be served a feature, you can handle most of that within LaunchDarkly's UI. For example, we have some restaurant groups that have 100's of locations. Rather than setting values at the location or user-level, I can simply set a flag at the restaurant group level and that automatically propagates to the user level. Sure, you could build this hierarchy into your homegrown tool, but I guarantee doing that in a very flexible manner won't be a slam dunk, and you'll soon find that you will want to change it and have to invest more time on something that may not be core to your business.
- custom rollout -- you can roll out by % of users or user properties. For instance I can roll out to 10% of users that are in Rhode Island, US. Did you really add this to your homegrown FF service? I hope you didn't tell your VCs that if so...
- centralized feature flag service -- we leverage across dozens of components, and use feature flags centrally on our cloud servers and on 1000's of agents installed inside our customers' locations (and on hardware that we don't own). Since LaunchDarkly uses server-sent events (SSE) this introduces no additional latency in making network calls to a central server. Changes to users and flags are sent streaming, seamlessly, behind the scenes, with minimal network impact. This key infrastructure decision that the team at LaunchDarkly made has given us confidence of using feature flags wherever we could feasibly imagine them without having any adverse impact to us or our customers. Oh, did you remember to build that into your homegrown FF solution?
- multivariate flags -- LaunchDarkly supports multivariate flags. For example, we throttle data transport for some of our remote agents. We can control this centrally so that certain agents only send back certain amounts of data (e.g. 1MB, 5MB, 10MB per batch of data sent). This actually extends the concept of FeatureFlags -- there are discrete variations within a single 'flag'. Don't forget to build that into your homegrown solution too.
- feature flag chaining -- you can specify a prerequisite for a feature flag. For example, for a rebranding of an entire website, you could have individual feature flags for each page, and then have a 'big bang' flag that does the entire thing at once. This allows you to test and manage 'micro features' but then turn on the 'major feature' easily.
- they have thought a lot about the technical debt that feature flags can introduce. How often have you added a feature flag only to not use it again or forget to remove it? It can make your code base ugly in a hurry. LaunchDarkly has analytics that help you identify usage paths as well as 'flag the flag' so you can be more conscious about what is a temporary vs permanent flag. This might not sound like much, but it prevents questions later about 'can we remove this flag' without causing impact. You've future proofed your homegrown solution to grow into this too, no doubt.
- organizational visibility and integrations with third party services -- LaunchDarkly has many integrations already built into it. For example, we use it to post to our #product channel in slack, so we can see when a new feature becomes available and when someone changes an existing flag/adds users to it. This has made communication about features much less time intensive because anyone can see the current state of a feature. You didn't really build a Slack integration or create a bot just for your homegrown feature flag service, did you?
If you think you'll eventually be in the place where what I've spoken about would be helpful, I would strongly suggest you consider a service like LaunchDarkly early in your development so that you can focus your energy on the right things and take advantage of the hard work that LD is putting into their service.