While strategizing ways to incrementally migrate over a website into a new infrastructure, page by page, a requirement was introduced that we could do so without a deployment, only the need to flip a switch, enabling us to instantly turn it on and off and scan for errors or oddities in usage. When hundreds of thousands of dollars are on the line from even an hour of outage, every second counts. During this investigation, we discovered a way to integrate LaunchDarkly, a leader in feature switch capabilities, into a variant of NGINX known as OpenResty. OpenResty provides the ability to integrate Lua, a language which previously I’ve only ever seen when working with World of Warcraft addons, and utilize the LaunchDarkly SDK to instantly switch where the user is being proxied to. Join me for a journey of chaotic learning, successes and pitfalls, with two technologies we knew nothing about, working its way from ideation to reality. A true story using the right tool for the job, even if it’s not our expertise.

This presentation will give some very basic introductions to NGINX, Lua, and LaunchDarkly, no experience needed! We sure didn’t have it…

This session will start by reviewing our architecture requirements at a high level, including factors around the decisions to use the technologies at hand, and the technologies we chose against. Basic coding of at least psudo code level would probably best for understanding. Syntax sugar requirements will be minimal if any.