How LaunchDarkly Uses Feature Flags for Rolling Maintenance Modes

Downtime is sometimes necessary for upgrades or maintenance in applications. There are different types of maintenance modes such as whole-site, whole-feature, and per-user feature maintenance. Depending on the stack, there may be existing libraries to help with this, but building your own 'maintenance mode' flag into your application can provide more flexibility. LaunchDarkly offers a solution for implementing maintenance mode flags as feature flags, allowing developers to only degrade the site as much as necessary and no more. Automation scripts can also be created to streamline the process of turning on maintenance mode for one user at a time.