Dark launches let you choose when to go live
Dark launches are a powerful way to deploy rapidly but limit your risk.
Split gives you feature flags to launch features dark, targeting to progressively roll them out, and alerting to detect errors if the launch goes bad.
What is a dark launch?
Dark launching is a go-live strategy in which you deploy a new feature without exposing it to users. Once you’re ready, turn on the feature all at once or progressively to users.
Dark launches help you continuously deploy, keeping your development team from coordinating dependencies or blocking to launch the feature at a later date.
Similar to canary releases, they can be used to exercise all the parts of your infrastructure involved in serving a feature.
Dark launch best practices
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Using feature flags to launch dark
Feature flags make it simple to dark launch a feature. Wrap the code in a flag, keep the flag off, release the new feature; there you have it.
Once the feature is ready to launch, you can validate it behind a feature flag by restricting access only to internal users, beta testers, or any proportion of your user base.
Dark launch your next feature
Feature flags give you a simple way to launch code without exposing it immediately to users.