LaunchDarkly launches Guarded Releases to improve release confidence at every stage of application rollouts

LaunchDarkly has come out with a new solution to help improve release confidence and reduce the risks associated with releasing new software.

The new offering, Guarded Releases, establishes benchmarks for performance, latency, and availability for each stage of a rollout.  This enables development teams to more proactively detect and address issues before they become issues for customers, and allows for easy rollback to previous stages. 

“Guarded Releases bring together real-time monitoring, automated recovery, error tracking, and user insights to resolve issues faster, elevate the user experience, and accelerate innovation,”  said Cody De Arkland, senior director of Product Incubation at LaunchDarkly. “With Guarded Releases, teams can ship, knowing each deployment is smarter, safer, and fully optimized for success.”

It provides visibility down to the feature flag level, and can track key metrics, like latency or error rates, that are important when it comes to understanding the success of a rollout. Guarded Releases can ingest telemetry data from a number of sources, including Sentry, Segment, OpenTelemetry, and LaunchDarkly SDKs. 

The new tool can also facilitate gradual rollouts where only a certain percentage of users get an update, which reduces the impact if issues are detected. Developers can define the audience exposure they want so that features are reaching “the right users at the right time for safe rollouts and early issue detection.”

If issues are detected, developers can trigger rollbacks directly from alerts received in Slack, email, or PagerDuty, or they can set thresholds for when Guarded Releases should automatically rollback an update without needing manual intervention.

Beyond this announcement, LaunchDarkly also revealed two new features that will be coming soon. First, Error Monitoring will link bugs to specific feature flags, identify affected users, and correlate metrics and system errors. Next, Session Replay will allow developers to replay user actions so that they can pinpoint exactly where and when a user starts experiencing problems.

“Together, these tools allow for fast root cause analysis and a full-picture view of issues without jumping between systems. At the end of the day, it’s all about de-risking your software releases to ensure a seamless customer experience,” LaunchDarkly wrote in a blog post. 

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