Targeted Rollouts: Take Control of Your Release Process
Software teams increasingly need more control over their release process to mitigate risk and ship faster.
David Isquick
The first step many teams take to reduce risk is adopting feature flags to decouple code deployment from feature enablement. However, while simple boolean (on/off) feature flags can help mitigate risk, elite software teams are embracing progressive delivery. They combine feature flags with more fine-grained audience controls to progressively release features to key audiences. We’re rolling out a new capability in our free Rollouts and paid Full Stack plans called targeted rollouts that helps teams adopt progressive delivery by providing more flexible rules and configurations by audiences.
Specify different percentages of traffic by audience
Targeted rollouts provides the ability to specify different traffic allocations by audience. This unlocks new use cases, for instance you can target a new feature to 100% of beta customers, but only 25% percentage of US customers. Additionally, you can roll out features by market or geo. A food delivery app could release features city by city to a percentage of its riders or drivers, and monitor performance and customer sentiment.
Easily control traffic allocation by audience
Define audiences and traffic allocations by environment
Another capability of targeted rollouts is the ability to specify different audiences and percentages of traffic by environment. This allows you to validate changes to features in development and staging environments before validating in production. For instance, a financial services company could validate that an auto-payment feature works correctly in staging environments to 100% of traffic while beginning to roll it out to a small percentage of production traffic.
Control feature rollouts by development environment
Configure feature variables by audience
Finally, targeted rollouts offers the ability to provide more granular control over experiences delivered by audience. With targeted rollouts, teams can use differentiated messaging by market, geo, plan, etc. For instance, an e-commerce site can specify unique messaging for a national holiday in some countries, while excluding that messaging in other countries.
Deliver tailored experiences by remotely configuring feature variables by audience
Get started with targeted rollouts today
If you are an existing Full Stack or Rollouts user, targeted rollouts will be rolling out to you over the next few months.
If you aren’t yet using Optimizely for feature flags, you can sign-up today for a free Optimizely Rollouts account here.
Check out our developer docs for more information about targeted rollouts.
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