“Operate”: The Second Pillar of Feature Management

The "Operate" pillar of feature management focuses on improving the operational health of applications by making feature flags an essential part of operations. This approach reduces risk and ensures customer satisfaction, as seen in Honeycomb's low failure rate due to its use of LaunchDarkly. Key use cases for Operate include kill switches and circuit breakers, dynamic configurations, service metrics (reactive monitoring), and safe migrations. Feature flags enable teams to maintain system availability, adjust logging levels on the fly, and perform safer infrastructure migrations. By using a centralized feature management platform like LaunchDarkly, teams can better track key service metrics alongside feature flag events, improving overall stability, reliability, and availability of their services.