LaunchDarkly has announced the Galaxy Product release of its DevOps platform. A key part of the release is a new set of integration partnerships with other software vendors. LaunchDarkly takes its mission by thinking beyond the DevOps process itself and considering what the end customer of any software solution needs and expects.
Galaxy aims to help software engineers build and deploy solutions from innovation through to delivery. As LaunchDarkly puts it, “Helping Engineers Build Products that Customers Love.”
Dan Rogers, CEO at LaunchDarkly, said, “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. With the Galaxy Product Release, LaunchDarkly hopes to provide engineering teams with a North Star that will solve for these gaps.”
Organisations often struggle with several seemingly competing dimensions of software development, security, stability, and the continuous innovation demanded by customers. Added to that, the developers must also ensure an excellent user experience whilst delivering a product that aligns with the organisation’s strategy.
The CI/CD practice has focused on continuous integration and continuous delivery, and sometimes around continuous deployment. Organisations also need to ensure security and quality (through testing) through that process. The customer is often outside of the considered loop but should be integral to it.
What is in Galaxy
With this release, LaunchDarkly is continuing toward its vision of providing not just better developer experiences but better customer experiences. The Galaxy Product Release includes that the platform helps customers maintain better control over their DevOps processes.
Maintaining stability at speed is difficult. Galaxy helps organisations to achieve this with Release Assistant and Release Guardian. Release Assistant enables teams to build pre-defined repeatable paths for progressive rollouts, building on the workflows that LaunchDarkly already supports. Release Guardian allows teams to quickly identify and remediate operational regressions.
Another pain point for Dev teams is technology migrations. The Migration Assistant helps organisations to structure migrations into up to six stages to better mitigate the risk of an outage, data loss or latency consistency between data stores. This feature is an early adopter for all users.
The new Segment Builder enables organisations to better manage audiences and their experiences in a single place. Engineers can define target segments using data from a mix of sources, including new integrations such as Census, Fulcrum, Heap, Hightouch, Rudderstack, and Twilio.
The LaunchDarkly Product Experimentation solution now includes Funnel Experiments. The feature enables engineers to measure business-critical user flows and provide results specific to those product funnels.
The world is increasingly using mobile apps, and Galaxy LaunchDarkly supports the entire mobile app version lifecycle. The mobile targeting experience enables engineers to target specific device cohorts.
The Engineering Insights Hub helps engineers to understand their code’s performance at a glance. They can view new information, including deployment failure rates, how experiments inform flag changes and the impact of your changes over time. It provides these metrics in a single location, delivering insights and enabling teams to iterate and improve.
New integrations with Galaxy
Alongside the new release, LaunchDarkly has also partnered with several tech companies, creating integrations to further strengthen the release.
The integrations include:
- Snowflake – LaunchDarkly has made their experimentation data available for direct access to joint customers via Snowflake Marketplace. It enables customers to stream LaunchDarkly feature events into Snowflake’s single, integrated platform for additional analysis of the business impact of development efforts based on warehoused data.
Kieran Kennedy, Head of Snowflake Marketplace, said, “Engineering teams have struggled with measuring and analyzing the business impact of new features, and we are excited to partner with LaunchDarkly to help alleviate that challenge across the software industry. Our mutual customers will now have a shared view of where key business metrics intersect with the software features they are testing, and this is a notable achievement in reducing that gap.”
- GitHub – Developers can power their GitHub Action’s workflows using LaunchDarkly to automatically create conditional controls, giving them visibility into which feature flags were modified as part of a pull request and making reference and code cleanup easy.
- Sentry – Combining Sentry errors and LaunchDarkly, developers can roll back and disable features that have a regression, enabling developers to react to escalated error counts before they affect customer experience.
- Bitrise – Integrating with Bitrise unlocks greater visibility into new mobile app versions before the app store approval process is complete, enabling developers to start planning mobile release targeting before their users see the latest version of their app.
Dan Rogers, CEO at LaunchDarkly, said, “LaunchDarkly’s Galaxy Product Release will be the North Star for today’s software development teams to create products that their customers love. I’m thankful for the initial group of technology companies that have joined our ecosystem, as these partnerships are a major step in unlocking this value for our customers.”
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
This is an impressive release from LaunchDarkly. While most of the feature improvements are iterative, it has definitely filled in many of the gaps within the DevOps cycle. With customers such as IBM, Atlassian and HP all using the LaunchDarkly platform, these new enhancements should strengthen their development teams.
DJ Spatoulas, Principal Architect at JupiterOne, commented, “LaunchDarkly has helped JupiterOne’s software development teams unlock the power to release our software both faster and safer. We’re looking forward to diving into LaunchDarkly’s newly launched core capabilities into areas like product experimentation, release targeting, and measurement to see how they can continue to be such a successful component of our software delivery practices.”
The new integrations with third-party vendors also make complete sense, and LaunchDarkly has demonstrated that its platform is open to new integrations that further strengthen and fill in the gaps where it doesn’t have a core focus. It is demonstrated that DevOps should not live in isolation but consider the wider strategic aims of the business and especially the end customer needs and requirements.
