Feature management within CI/CD pipelines

With feature management, having its biggest impact within the delivering stage of the DevOps life cycle and with the expectation that most people are adopting CI/CD pipelines, I wanted to share a few things before we move on and look at feature management and LaunchDarkly.

I want to make it clear that feature management is not a replacement for good CI/CD processes – it is an enhancement of the CI/CD process that offers more control and opportunities to teams.

For some, the idea of changing features within a production system might seem to go against the merits of a good CI/CD pipeline, in that to get a deployment to the production environment, it must go through several quality gates before it is deemed good enough to be released. But, once in production, that system could be changed, and that leads to the question, if a release to production could change once deployed, do the quality gates matter so much? The quality gates do matter and are just as valuable as they would be without feature management. However, the difference is that all possible configurations of the service should be tested within those quality gates before a feature is deemed to be ready for customers. The ability to test all these variations provides the reassurance that whether a feature is on or off, your service will continue to work as expected.

As we will see throughout this book, feature management is not an end itself, but a means to an end. By implementing feature management within CI/CD processes, new opportunities will present themselves, such as the following:

• Testing in Production: This is where a new implementation can be evaluated against a current feature. By using data directly from customers, the new implementation can be proven to be more valuable before it is rolled out to all customers. This covers several topics we will explore, such as rollouts, experimentations, and switches.
• Trunk-Based Development: In this case, production can become the only environment for testing, which speeds up development time and reduces the cost of maintaining multiple production-like environments.
• Infrastructure Migrations: This is where large migrations can be carried out safely and in a methodical manner, even if some parts of a system should be migrated but other parts remain on the existing implementations.

These methodologies and processes can be implemented in other ways but adopting feature management can offer them all within one approach.