Rollout.io

A No-Nonsense DevOps Tutorial For Beginners With Examples

The following is a guest blog post written byMichiel Mulders. DevOps has become mainstream in the last decade and continues to gain in popularity. That’s why we’re providing this DevOps tutorial to help you get started quickly. DevOps consists of five important processes that can help any organization to deliver high-quality software faster. For this …

Git Detached Head: What This Means and How to Recover

The following is a guest blog post written by Carlos Schults. Newcomers to Git often get confused with some of the messages that the VCS tool throws at them. The “You are in ‘detached HEAD’ state” one is certainly one of the weirdest. After coming across this message, most people start furiously Googling “git detached …

Git Switch Branch: Everything You Need to Know

The following is a guest blog post written by Carlos Schults. Repositories in Git work in a fundamentally different way from most other tools. One of the most glaring examples of said differences is branching. In most other VCS tools, branching is this elaborate ceremony. They make a huge deal out of it, and developers …

Technical Debt Management with Feature Flags: Strategy & Best Practices

Technical debt is accumulated as unmanaged flags accrue in an application’s code. And the associated marginal gain (i.e. each unmanaged flag added) directly impacts the amount of time and resources needed for testing. This can lead to more serious issues with the affected development, performance/testing, and product processes becoming more expensive. As software teams grow and …

Testing with Feature Flags to Improve Developer Productivity

This post is one in a series of blogs discussing continuous integration and feature flagging. Feature Flags can improve your continuous integration process in a number of ways. This post will focus on how CloudBees Feature Flags can help improve your developer productivity and shorten the feedback loop with the Flag Override view for frontend …

Git Revert Commit: Everything to Know About Going Back

The following is a guest post written by Carlos Schults. Going back in time is a crucial feature in any VCS. Git is no exception, but being more powerful and flexible than its centralized competitors, it can be somewhat confusing for beginners. Today, we’re here to help people looking to understand what “git revert commit” …

The Advantages of Flags-As-Code

As organizations are speeding up and scaling their software development to match the needs of the modern consumer, they are focused on doing so without losing visibility, traceability, and auditability. These are things, that while slower and more cumbersome, had previously helped prevent bugs and problems from becoming prevalent in software projects. Developing things “-as-code” …

Use Feature Flags to Drive Innovation Without Increasing Risk in Financial Services

As you’re aware, speed of software development is critical in the financial services sector, but you have an added level of risk and complexity in your users’ data that many industries don’t have. The margin for error is very slim, and yet the systems are growing increasingly complex as modern banking moves more and more …

Feature Flipper (Or Toggle): What Is It and Why Use It?

The following is a guest blog post written by Marjan Venema. You hit the button to confirm the last merge pull request for the day and slowly lean back in your chair. This is it. Tomorrow the new release hits every customer. Everybody on the development team has done their utmost to make it good, …

How to Disable Code: The Developer’s Production Kill Switch

The following is a guest post written by Carlos Schults. Being able to disable code in production is a power that many developers aren’t aware of. And that’s a shame. The ability to switch off some portions—or even complete features—of the codebase can dramatically improve the software development process by allowing best practices that can …

CloudBees Feature Flags Are Available On-Premise!

My parents are the average social media-obsessed Millennial’s nightmare. A few years ago, they moved to the ends of the earth as far as I’m concerned: the base of the Bighorn Mountains in (very) remote Wyoming. Rather than spending their retirement savings traveling the world adding to their Instagram stories like any “normal” person, they …

A/B Testing with CloudBees Rollout and Google Analytics (Part I)

Feature flags are a key tool for continuous delivery. Software developers utilize feature flagging to iterate quickly and release safely, ultimately improving product development. This continuous improvement is a beneficial byproduct of continuous delivery, made possible through repeating scientific methods. Experimentation like A/B testing is a popular way to test variations of an application. Feature …

Dark Launch: A Detailed Introductory Guide With Specifics

This is a guest post from Michiel Mulders. Have you ever considered different launch strategies for product updates? Did you ever experience the launch of a feature that the audience of your application didn’t actually desire? Dark launches are here to save you! A dark launch is a safe way of releasing a new product …

Rapid Deployment of New Subscription Billing with Flag-Driven Development

As software developers, we are tasked with the challenge of telling the future. When we release a new feature, there should be little to no surprises – although many times this is not the case. We try to minimize surprises through various practices – discovery, grooming, code review, and test coverage, etc. Unfortunately, these take …

Canary Deployment: What It Is and How To Use It

Deploying to production can be risky. Despite all the mitigation strategies we put in place—QA specialists, automated test suites, monitoring and alerts, code reviews and static analysis—systems are getting more complex every day. This makes it more likely that a new feature can ripple into other areas of your app, causing unforeseen bugs and eroding …

Canary Deployment: What It Is and How To Use It

Deploying to production can be risky. Despite all the mitigation strategies we put in place—QA specialists, automated test suites, monitoring and alerts, code reviews and static analysis—systems are getting more complex every day. This makes it more likely that a new feature can ripple into other areas of your app, causing unforeseen bugs and eroding …

Rollout Tutorial: Feature Flagging in your React Native App in 5 minutes

Learn how to set up, install and implement processes to setup a basic boolean flag on components using Rollout in React Native.

React Native Developer Series: Advanced Jenkins Pipelines, Notifications and Security

Find out how to work with advanced Jenkins pipelines, set notifications and bolster security in part four of a developer series on React Native.

React Native Developer Series: Deploy iOS and Android Pipelines with Fastlane and Jenkins

Learn how to use Fastlane and Jenkins to deploy mobile apps to Apple's AppStore or Android's Google Play Store in this React Native developer series.

React Native Developer Series: iOS and Android Fastlane Setup and Certificates

Learn how to deploy at app to iOS and Android using Fastlane in part two of this four-part developer series on React Native.

Introducing The CloudBees Rollout PHP SDK

CloudBees Rollout is excited to announce the latest addition to our supported language library, and it’s a big one! PHP is now supported by the CloudBees Rollout SDK, allowing the millions of web developers using PHP to put their features behind flags and start running gradual rollouts to users. PHP is not a new language …

React Native Developer Series: Expo, Version Control, GitHub and Initial CI/CD Processes

Learn about expo, version control, GitHub, and initial CI/CD processes in part one of this developer series on React Native.

Server Side Rendering and Feature Flag Management

CloudBees Rollout has been offering Javascript SDKs for years. On one hand, rox-node can be used on the server side and, on the other, rox-browser is there for client-side, in-browser feature flags. While this covers many use cases, the limit between server and client is becoming fuzzier. React applications are no longer Single Page Applications running in the browser only. Everyone cares about SEO and Server Side Rendering (SSR) is becoming a standard. And if you use feature flags to show or hide some functionalities or data, SSR also makes sense from a security perspective: do not send to the …

How we used Feature Flags to launch CloudBees CI/CD powered by Jenkins X. And you can do it too.

CloudBees CI/CD powered by Jenkins X is an automated and opinionated CI/CD as a Service solution for cloud native applications. It takes everything that makes Jenkins X great and gives it to you in a hosted, turnkey way with no overhead services to manage. We announced the preview program at DevOps World in Lisbon recently – you can join the preview program at https://www.cloudbees.com/products/cloudbees-ci-cd/sign-up Leveraging the power of Kubernetes for end to end application development, CloudBees CI/CD maximizes the efficiency and speed of the cloud native CI/CD pipeline, with the least possible overhead, for development teams using modern DevOps practices. …

Launching the new CloudBees.com wasn’t a risky proposition using feature flags

CloudBees is growing and as part of our business growth, we found that we needed  to overhaul and rebuild our corporate website. In keeping with our DNA, we wanted to do this in a continuous fashion to ensure resilience, find defects early and reduce overall risk at launch time. We decided to move away from our old content management system (CMS) which was better suited for a smaller company to a more robust, modern CMS, Contentful, that gives us more enterprise capabilities like finely tuned access controls that allow designated CloudBees employees to edit the web content they own directly. …

How Feature Flags Help You Put Customers First

Learn how to improve your customers' user experience and improve the CI/CD pipeline with feature flags.

Serverless Apps and CloudBees Rollout Feature Flags

Discover how simple it is to use feature flags in a serverless environment and why CloudBees Rollout is a great option for it.

A/B Testing with Feature Flags

Learn what feature flags are and the 5 key steps to A/B testing with CloudBees Rollout.

Feature Flags and GitOps. 5 Use Cases to Help You ‘Git’r Done.

Learn what GitOps is and how it works with feature flags with this outline of use cases.

Using Anomaly Detection to Kill a CloudBees Rollout Experiment

Learn how to set up your features on the Rollout CloudBees app to collects log and error data.

Don’t Branch that Code! Feature Flags vs. Feature Branches

Learn the difference between feature flags vs. feature branches and the strategy behind branch by abstraction.

5 Best Practices for Feature Flagging

As software teams seek higher agility, the tools and techniques for software development and delivery continue to evolve every year. DevOps and CI/CD practices provide a solid framework that allows teams to release software with increased automation and with less risk. One of the best ways to do this is to incorporate feature flagging into software development practices. In their most basic form, feature flags are “if and else” statements that create a conditional branch into code, which allows developers to restrict some functionality to certain groups of users. If a flag or toggle is switched on, the code is executed; else skipped. …

Rollout Joins CloudBees Family

“You want to put the fire out first and then worry about the fire code” – Ben Bernanke Today we are incredibly excited to announce that Rollout.io has been acquired by CloudBees. When we founded Rollout, we set a goal to help software teams mitigate the risk of making changes to software that is already in production. Like others, we understood that in order to enable true software craftsmanship, to allow a team to manifest creativity and ideas into customer value, you must have automation in place. Your testing suite should run continuously as part of your integration suite, on …

The 8 Best GitHub Integrations to Look at in 2019

Github is the internet's premiere source code repository. Here's a list of integrations for Github that you can use to help you better manage your code.

What Is a Branching Strategy?

What's a branching strategy? Why do you need one? We'll answer your questions here and describe centralized and forking workflows, GitHub Flow, & Gitflow

Configuration as Code: Everything You Need to Know

Configuration as code is a set of processes and practices that will save you time, increase your flexibility, and improve your system uptime.

YAML Tutorial: Everything You Need to Get Started in Minutes

YAML Ain't Markup Language (YAML) has a risen in popularity over the past few years. Here's a YAML tutorial to get you started quickly.

Liquibase Tutorial: Learn to Manage Your Database Schema

Liquibase is a tool for database versioning, it does migrations and has built-in refactorings. Commbined with feature flags, it helps ease deployment pain!

10 Mistakes You’re Probably Baking Into Your Source Code

Here are 10 mistakes you're probably baking into your source code, and you may not even know it. You can make mistakes—just don't keep making the same ones!

Infrastructure as Code: Everything You Need to Know

This post explores the various elements of infrastructure as code, and will assist you in making informed decisions with its implementation

Realm Database Tutorial: Get Started Quickly With Swift

Realm database replaces Core Data and SQLite in an iOS application. Here's a quick start guide for taking advantage of Realm in an iOS app.

Beta Release: 8 Things That Make It Successful

What can we do to make sure our beta release succeeds? Following these eight components helps you deliver the features your customers need.

The Future of Feature Flags Lies in Infrastructure As Code

Today, we show you some problems with common approaches to feature flagging. We explain the concept of "infrastructure as code" and how it can help.

Configuration as Code Support and Integration with GitHub to Treat Feature Flags as Mission Critical Operations

Today we announced our feature management platform will leverage Configuration as Code (CaC) and a powerful integration with GitHub, so developers can treat feature flags as they treat any other mission-critical infrastructure. Additionally, we plan to open source our feature management platform, providing greater flexibility and stronger ownership of feature changes in production. Both moves allow development organizations to gain the benefits of using feature flags – such as increased speed of development and deployment, and reduced risks of deploying new code – without sacrificing any of the known management processes that govern the software development lifecycle (SDLC). “Rollout’s CaC approach, the integration with …

Trunk-Based Development: What It Is and Why You Need It Now

If you’re struggling with spending too much time fixing merge conflicts or recovering missing code, you might consider trunk-based development.

Python Feature Flag Guide

Today we learn how to use the Python toggle command to coordinate a change between client and microservice without rolling out new code.

Unit Testing Best Practices When You Have External Dependencies

Unit testing with external dependencies may be hard, but it's worth the hard work! Today we look at the best way to proceed in these situations.

Git Create Branch: 4 Ways to Do It

In today's post, we cover several ways you can create a branch in Git, as well as reflect on Git's branching model and branching in general.

Demystifying Serverless Computing: Definition, Tutorial, and Examples

Today, we do an overview of serverless computing, provide an example, and talk about where this architectural style makes sense.

A Guide to Getting Started Quickly With AngularJS Feature Flags

Today's post is a step-by-step guide on how to get feature flags running in your AngularJS app using Rollout. Are you ready to become an expert?

How to Test in Your Local Environment When Using a Feature Flag Management System

In today's post we look at some ideas that help us mitigate or eliminate the testing cost of using a feature flag management system.

Server-Side Rendering: Everything You Need to Know

Are server-side-rendered websites dead? Alsolutely not. In today's post, we talk about what server-side rendering is and why it is still useful today.

The Value of Feature Flags in CI/CD

Feature flags allow you a lot of flexibility with feature deployment and product management decisions. But they're also a big help in CI/CD.

A Guide to Getting Started Quickly With .NET Feature Flags

Feature toggle C#, feature flag C#, feature flipper C#—whatever you call it, today's post is a detailed guide on how to do it.

Feature Visibility Is the Key to Modern Software Agility

In today's post, we cover why feature visibility is the key to software agility. What degree of feature visibility do you have at your disposal?

What Are Audit Logs?

Audit logging can provide a ton of value. In today's post, we cover what audit logs are, why you should use them, and how to use audit logging.

Hand-Rolled Solutions: A Fun Waste of Time

In today's post, we cover the hidden costs of rolling your own solution, and when to use someone else's solution, despite the risks. Find out why making a hand-rolled solution to a common problem is a waste of time and resources.

Merge Conflict: Everything You Need to Know

In today's post, we answer FAQs about why and on which branch a merge conflict typically occurs, discuss the two major sources of merge conflicts, and review how to properly rebase your changes of a feature branch locally.

Is DevOps Really for All Types of Organizations?

Are all organizations "DevOps organizations?" They certainly can be. DevOps isn't a checklist — it's a culture. And it can work anywhere.

Why Having a Feature Flag Microservice Is a Bad Idea

In today's post, we cover why having a feature flag microservice doesn't work, and what to do if you have already tried to turn your feature flags into a microservice.

Get a Progressive Web App Running in Just 20 Minutes!

In this tutorial, we'll show you how to get a progressive web app up and running in only 20 minutes while also exploring key tools for understanding and working with PWAs.

Why Transformational Leadership Is Needed in Every DevOps Initiative

In today's post, we talk about what transformational DevOps leadership is and why it is needed in every DevOps initiative. We will also be looking at the foundations in leadership that guarantee the success of a DevOps initiative.

Service Migration: A Prerequisite for Modern Agility

Have you heard the buzz about service migration? Do you want to know why it's important to your agility? In this post, I'll explain what service migration is and how it may be important to your company.

Is CMMI Dead Yet? If Not, Can It Be?

In today's post, we talk about how CMMI has no place in a post-Agile world, and how we should let it die peacefully instead of trying to resurrect it.

Database Migration: What It Is and How to Do It

In this post, we'll help beginner developers quickly learn the key ideas behind database migration and talk about potential pitfalls.