Hi HN, I’m Isaac, co-founder and CTO of Armory in the YC W17 batch.
Ever had a deployment fail only to find out it was impossible to rollback to the previous version? Or get paged at 2am when the user experience is broken?<p>Armory.io makes deployments boring (like ‘waiting for your code to compile’ boring), non-events that happen continuously, and always in the background. We do that by simplifying the installation and configuration of Spinnaker - an open source continuous delivery platform from Netflix.<p>We all worked together at our last company and experienced the pain of scary deployments with low engineering velocity. When I became the SVP Engineering there, I decided that needed to change. We broke a brittle monolith app up into microservices, started deploying with Kubernetes, and created a CI/CD pipeline that allowed us to go from deploying just a few painful times per month (taking weeks and multiple manager approvals to deploy) to 2,000x deployments per month, continuously. The cascading effects were that we started working on parts of the codebase that had been stagnant for years because we were afraid to touch them (the original developers had long left the company). Here’s a screenshot of a chart that shows the delta: <a href="http://drod.io/43452e3V0N28" rel="nofollow">http://drod.io/43452e3V0N28</a> — each color is a different microservice; you can see how those blossomed as we broke the monolith up and started deploying each microservice on the cadence that was best for it. And we had much happier engineers, too, because they could see their code running immediately in production, and they took ownership of it running successfully in prod (as a side effect we went from a traditional ops team to a no-ops approach).<p>We were so passionate about the transformative effect this had on the company that we started Armory to bring it to any company — which is especially needed in large, low performing organizations that typically deploy just 7x per year (compared to 4,000x per day at Netflix).<p>We’d love to hear your stories of deployments gone wrong, hear your questions about Armory, or anything else on your mind!
Hey y'all, I recently started working on a CI/CD product at an organization where the number of deployments per month is in the same ballpark as Netflix. In my experience, adopting systems for rapid deployments also requires adopting new processes. For example, products that are deployed frequently need to have developers on call during deployment windows. These developers tend to have a specialized skill set that makes them effective at handling botched deployments and bugs in production.<p>How y'all are planning to approach the cultural changes companies will have to adopt in order to leverage faster deployments?
I haven't gotten very deep into the guts of Spinnaker, but how are you expecting to handle the enormous number of organizations that prohibit developers from having production access and require someone in operations to perform a deployment? Even if you do all the necessary steps of API versioning, feature flags, blue / green deploys and such, most of these start to break down fast in velocity when there's a requirement for removing control away from developers to those that have less familiarity with the impact of changes. I absolutely agree something needs to address low-performing software organizations because oftentimes they're among the highest-impact organizations out there such as the Fortune 100 and public sector (as opposed to some SaaS company with a whole 1000 customers) but I haven't been able to crack the problem of many different reasons for dysfunctions leading to such low rates of deployments (it's invariably a Wicked Problem due to being almost entirely social in roots rather than technical I've observed so far).
spinnaker as a service. pretty cool idea. what is your planned pricing look like? spinnaker is not cheap to run yourself.<p>Also I tried the "try spinnaker" link and it looks like it timed out at armory.formstack.com
Here's a deeper dive on Spinnaker, and on how Armory is commercializing it for enterprises: <a href="http://go.Armory.io/Evaluate" rel="nofollow">http://go.Armory.io/Evaluate</a>