Understanding the user

Throughout this book, we have explored various aspects of the user and how to implement the User object within your applications. It is important to understand that the user is as crucial to feature management as the feature flag itself. Without the ability to know who the user is and their details, it is very difficult to target features at specific customers or percentages or rings of customers. We have already discussed using ring and percentage rollouts to target users in detail in Chapter 4, Percentage and Ring Rollouts.

The concept of a user extends further to not necessarily dealing with actual people or customers but a request or a session. This allows systems to communicate without an actual customer making a request. With this in mind, the User object that LaunchDarkly uses can be considered as more than just a person. It can be considered as an object in which metadata can be provided to enable or disable features. For example, the version number...