Risk-Free Digital Transformation for the U.S. Federal Government
Feature management gives federal agencies the control they need to modernize safely. Deploy software without fear, release without stress, and migrate infrastructure without worry.
LaunchDarkly for the U.S. Federal Government
LaunchDarkly is a feature management platform that empowers federal government teams to safely deliver and control software through feature flags. By separating code deployments from feature releases, LaunchDarkly enables federal agencies to deploy much faster than before and virtually eliminate risk in the process. With LaunchDarkly as a safeguard, teams feel extreme confidence when publishing code changes. A dozen U.S. federal agencies and thousands of other organizations rely on LaunchDarkly for feature management.
Webinar | Best Practices
Feature Management as a DevSecOps Best Practice
Empowering the federal sector to achieve flexible releases and greater control of customer experiences.
With releases on Recreation.gov happening only once or twice a year for some inventory types, there isn’t room for mistakes. Feature flags enable us to silently validate releases in production before public sales and rapidly configure features in real time when needed.
Learn how Recreation.gov uses LaunchDarkly to safely deliver and control software.
Benefits of LaunchDarkly Feature Management
Reduce Operational Risk
Progressively deliver code. Disable buggy features instantly—no rollbacks required.
Safely Migrate to the Cloud
Use feature flags to upgrade your infrastructure with zero downtime.
Shrink Time-to-Value
Separate ‘deploy’ from ‘release’; ship code changes daily.
Control Features in Real-Time
Control who sees what when. Process code changes in milliseconds, not minutes.
Release Faster
Deliver Features at the Speed of Innovation
LaunchDarkly enables development teams to build better, more reliable software faster. Software engineers for federal agencies use LaunchDarkly feature flags for trunk-based development, “safe” CI/CD, testing in production, canary launches, and other modern development techniques.
Separate Deployments from Releases - Get all the benefits of agile development and continuous delivery but without the risk. LaunchDarkly separates code deployments from feature releases, so you can ship code whenever you want without impacting end-users.
Safely Test in Production - Stop “soaking” your code in staging. With LaunchDarkly, developers can use feature flags to safely test their code in production early and often, encouraging a culture of real-time testing and feedback. Testing with a small cohort of real, live users early reduces the odds of a major failure occurring on launch day.
Iterate Often, Build Things People Want - Something magical happens when you’re able to test features in production without fear. You learn faster about how your features affect users and systems. You iterate more rapidly and extensively. And when you ship new features, rather than hope and pray you got it right, you are certain that constituents actually want what you’ve built.
Targeted Rollouts - Canary launches, percentage rollouts, ring deployments, beta tests—you can do them all with LaunchDarkly’s feature management platform. Release features to users at your own pace. Start small, gain confidence, and ease your way to 100%.
We've been able to roll out new features at a pace that would've been unheard of a couple of years ago.
Organizations like IBM, NBC, & Microsoft use LaunchDarkly to continuously deliver value to their customers.
Safe Migrations
Safely Manage Changes to Your Entire Stack
Whether you're moving to a full cloud or hybrid cloud architecture, LaunchDarkly feature flags make the transition smoother. Employ fine-grained control when routing traffic between your old and new systems. Test functionality in production before proceeding to the next phase of your migration. Slowly roll out your new infrastructure in safe, incremental stages. Modernize your infrastructure while maintaining perfect operational health.
Migrate Infrastructure and Databases - Migrating infrastructure is scary, but it doesn’t have to be. Use feature flags to safely establish your new infrastructure in production, alongside your old version, and test it every step of the way. By using feature flags, you can mitigate risk during major upgrades like database migrations, switching cloud providers, or swapping an algorithm.
Sunset Unused Features - At some point, old features conflict with new ones, or they fall into disuse and become technical debt. Feature management gives teams fine-grained control over retiring these features, allowing them to shelve old features gracefully. LaunchDarkly enables you to manage the entire lifecycle of a feature, including end-of-life.
Upgrade Microservices and Tools - When implementing new microservices, feature flags enable you to regulate the flow of traffic to the new architectural components. Easily test and verify the functionality across your entire production stack as you gradually roll out the new service. LaunchDarkly feature management is integral to successful microservices upgrades and migrations.
Reduce Risk
Lower Your Operational Risk
Releasing faster can be scary if you don't have the right tools in place. Safely deliver on the promise of continuous delivery without sacrificing quality for speed.
Kill Switches - Bugs happen. What do you do when they affect performance? You take action before they turn into a major incident. Use feature flags as a “kill switch” to disable any feature or code path within 200 milliseconds. No need to stay up all night rolling back code and deploying emergency fixes.
Eliminate Risky Code and Bugs - No more waiting and wondering if there will be issues once a feature gets into your production systems. Test your code early and often. Expose new features to internal teams and run sanity tests, smoke tests, and beta tests all within production. Find and remove bugs earlier in the product delivery process.
Safety Valves (Circuit Breakers) - Long-term feature flags enable you to gracefully degrade non-critical functionality and maintain overall availability when you detect a problem. Just wrap your key features, microservices, and third-party SaaS integrations with a feature flag and automatically switch to a failover option without having to push new code.
Monitor and Troubleshoot Features - Advanced teams use LaunchDarkly's feature management platform to help troubleshoot and resolve issues in real-time, helping to create a culture of accountability. Developers can monitor their features, and when they spot issues, they use the Audit Log to pinpoint the source of the incident and resolve it immediately.
Dynamic Control
Gain Dynamic Control Over Your Features
Take control of your features like a super-admin. Coordinate and delegate release control to other teams in your organization, turn off features when they are causing performance issues, and retire features when it’s time to move on. You control everything, all in real-time. No more rollbacks, hotfixes, or updating config files.
Coordinated Releases - Create one centralized command center across all your applications to ensure consistent releases and global visibility. Use feature flag prerequisites to control granular features from a global level even if they are used within multiple applications or technology stacks. Turn everything ‘on’ or ‘off’ within 200 milliseconds, no matter where the code lives.
Product and Marketing Launches - Reduce the burden on your development team by giving business stakeholders (e.g., product managers) control over feature releases. LaunchDarkly's intuitive dashboard makes it easy for product and marketing teams to segment and target specific users for beta tests and roll out new features when they are ready for general availability.
Change Configurations Dynamically - Dynamically change configurations at any time without redeploying or reconfiguring any part of your production application. By using multivariate feature flags for operational use cases, you can adjust things like log levels or API rate limits in real-time. Instead of constantly slowing down your application with verbose logs, for example, you can trigger such logs only in cases where you really need them.
Learn More About Our Product
We use LaunchDarkly to release new features to a subset of our guests, gather responses, fine-tune our approach, and validate new features in production to be able to deliver a better experience for all travelers.
