Parachutes for the Rocketship: How Companies Like LinkedIn Ship Innovations While Keeping Customers Safe

1. Powering Safe Launch @
Scale
July 26th, 2017
Adil Aijaz
CEO/Co-Founder @ Split
adil@split.io

2. ADIL AIJAZ
Moving fast, and slow, at different scales since 2006

3. Mission
To empower enterprises to build better software, faster.
Product
An intelligent software delivery platform for developers, product managers and
entire teams that enables safe launch, full-stack experimentation, and the dynamic
configuration of features.
About Us
● Founded in Redwood City, CA in 2015 by domain experts from Google,
LinkedIn, Salesforce, and Databricks
● Backed by Accel Partners and Lightspeed Ventures

4. Controlled Rollout & Experimentation
Software is being delivered faster than ever before

5. 90% of world’s data was created in the last 2 years

7. Best software companies are
agile and have a culture of
experimentation

8. Agility

9. Biggest force enabling agility:
Continuous Delivery

10. Software continuously delivered
as small, iterative features

11. ● Merging code into trunk on a daily basis.
● Having branches or forks with very short lifetimes -
less than a day.
● Having fewer than three active branches at any time.
Source: State of DevOps Report - 2016
Behaviors of “High Performance Teams”:

12. Any feature deployment could
break the product for all
customers
Continuous Risk:

13. Microsoft used an army of QA
engineers to solve this problem
Back in the 90s:

14. Modern teams use Safe Launch
Today:

15. Software continuously delivered
as small, iterative features to
subsets of customers …. then
gradually dialed out to all
customers

16. Rooted in feature flags, A/B
testing, and Dynamic
Configuration

17. Feature Flags

18. Mechanism to separate code
deploy from feature deploy.

19. if (feature on) {
// show feature
} else {
// do not show feature
}

20. Feature Flags + Targeting Engine

21. if (feature on for this customer) {
// show feature
} else {
// do not show feature
}

22. • Whitelisted Customers
• Scrum Team
• Employees
• Pilot Partners
• Customer Segments
• Trial Customers
• Geo Located Customers
• Revenue Based Targeting
• Percentages
• 20% of all customers
• 10% of Customers in
Austin
Launch Features to a
Targeted Set of
Customers

23. Kill Switch

24. • Agility
• Trunk-Based Development
• Customer Feedback Loop
• Quality
• Limits blast radius of
problems.
• Quality testing in production.
• Performance
• Stress test your systems
before GA
• Reduce cost of maintaining
perf labs.
• Security
• Avoid copying production data
to non-production
environments
Benefits

25. You can’t be agile nor practice
Continuous Delivery without
Safe Launch
Summary:

26. Experimentation

27. One of the goals of agile
development is to practice
customer-centric development

28. Start with an idea, launch
prototype to customers, measure
KPIs, then refine based on
feedback loop

29. Software delivered as small,
iterative features to subsets of
customers …. then measured for
impact on KPIs

30. See the similarities?

31. Safe Launch is about stability +
agility
Experimentation is about
optimization + stability + agility

32. Launch A Recommendation Algorithm
Safe Launch:
Did we negatively impact
any technical KPIs?
Experimentation:
Did we positively impact
business KPI while avoiding
negative impact on all
technical and business
KPIs?

33. Safe Launch & Experimentation
are two sides of the same coin

34. Safe Launch /
Stability / Agility
Experimentation
/ Optimization
Safe Launch /
Stability / Agility
Interplay of Safe Launch & Experimentation
- 10%
- 50%
- 100%

35. Experimentation is the frontier of
modern software development

36. Innovative Companies Build Safe Launch & Experimentation Platforms
Gatekeeper LiX
WebLabsUber XP

37. For additional meetup information, please
contact us on meetup@split.io
Thank you!