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Launch HN: Armory.io (YC W17) – We Make Deployments Boring and Self-Service

51 points by imosquera 10y ago

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? 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. 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: http://drod.io/43452e3V0N28 http://drod.io/43452e3V0N28 — 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). 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). We’d love to hear your stories of deployments gone wrong, hear your questions about Armory, or anything else on your mind!

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moondev 10y ago
spinnaker as a service. pretty cool idea. what is your planned pricing look like? spinnaker is not cheap to run yourself. Also I tried the "try spinnaker" link and it looks like it timed out at armory.formstack.com
- danielodio 10y ago
  Ben is going to talk about the 'as a service piece' in a minute. Here's pricing info: http://go.Armory.io/pricing http://go.Armory.io/pricing
- techcofounder 10y ago
  I'm one of the cofounders of Armory. Thanks for letting us know of the timeout - we're looking into that now. Today, our enterprise version of Spinnaker is hosted within your AWS account, not truly hosted Spinnaker as a service, although we def plan to offer that down the road. Our current customers have told us they prefer to run Spinnaker inside their own accounts b/c they fear data leakage.
  - techcofounder 10y ago
    Btw, I realize our website still has "hosted spinnaker" as a product offering. It was the first thing we built, but as mentioned above, we pivoted towards an "on-prem" (in your AWS) version after conversations with lots of customers.
  - moondev 10y ago
    I see, so it's a centralized control plane for spinnaker installation/upgrades. looking forward to trying it out! I've done a bunch of spinnaker + kubernetes integrations myself. Exciting space for sure.
    - imosquera 10y ago
      As of today, that is main value prop, however over time we hope to add other microservices to Spinnaker that will provide value on top of the control plane.
danielodio 10y ago
Here's a deeper dive on Spinnaker, and on how Armory is commercializing it for enterprises: http://go.Armory.io/Evaluate http://go.Armory.io/Evaluate
- IgorPartola 10y ago
  I love that there is a service named Igor. Could never find my name on a keychain or a door sign, but now I have a service named after me :)
  - danielodio 10y ago
    ahaha nice -- you can learn more about Igor here: https://github.com/spinnaker/igor/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/spinnaker/igor/blob/master/README.md
  - lintoma 10y ago
    We called it Igor because it was a friend of Jenkins. It's named after https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igor_(character) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igor_(character) . There is another service internally called Woodhouse
georgeaf99 10y ago
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. How y'all are planning to approach the cultural changes companies will have to adopt in order to leverage faster deployments?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- imosquera 10y ago
  We believe that DevOps encompasses 3 areas that must change: people, processes, & technology. We’re seeing evidence that the people/culture is already changing organically because companies must change in order to compete in the software era, and the velocity at which we see software-first companies entering traditional spaces like banking/finance, real-estate, hotel is also accelerating. That said, in order to make this rate of change to happen faster, instead of trying to convince people through debates, we have to show proof that moving towards a true DevOps model is successful, not just because you get to deploy more, but because it matters to the business. We want to show that CI/CD helps meet SLAs, new valuable features are added and allows the business to address new markets.
  - danielodio 10y ago
    To add on to that: The best way we've found to work with large enterprises (aka Global 2000) is to start w/ just one team & app, show success with that, and then expand from there. We've found that big companies need to see one team achieving success before they'll adopt it throughout the organization. We've employed this approach successfully with our first several customers. They're going from from one app --> 5 apps --> "GA" rollout internally.
- techcofounder 10y ago
devonkim 10y ago
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).
- imosquera 10y ago
  We believe that engineers should have access to deploy, manage and ultimately own their own deployments. This fundamental change is more commonly known as DevOps. In our interviews with over 100 enterprise companies, before we even incorporated the company, we observed a strong desire for teams to move in this direction. While we are aware there are many laggards, we’re making a bet, with Armory, that companies must move in this direction or die. That said, it’s an immense challenge working with the F100, which for some, don’t want to move in this direction yet. We’ve chosen not to focus those laggard companies. Even within our current focus, we’ve found that we actually can’t hire fast enough to support new customers who want to truly enable their deployment teams. And yes, it’s very much a “Wicked Problem” to solve but we’re hoping that with Spinnaker and market pressure it helps loosen those roots.

51 points by imosquera 10y ago

deleted 10y ago

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deleted 10y ago

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moondev 10y ago

spinnaker as a service. pretty cool idea. what is your planned pricing look like? spinnaker is not cheap to run yourself. Also I tried the "try spinnaker" link and it looks like it timed out at armory.formstack.com

danielodio 10y ago
Ben is going to talk about the 'as a service piece' in a minute. Here's pricing info: http://go.Armory.io/pricing http://go.Armory.io/pricing
techcofounder 10y ago
I'm one of the cofounders of Armory. Thanks for letting us know of the timeout - we're looking into that now. Today, our enterprise version of Spinnaker is hosted within your AWS account, not truly hosted Spinnaker as a service, although we def plan to offer that down the road. Our current customers have told us they prefer to run Spinnaker inside their own accounts b/c they fear data leakage.
- techcofounder 10y ago
  Btw, I realize our website still has "hosted spinnaker" as a product offering. It was the first thing we built, but as mentioned above, we pivoted towards an "on-prem" (in your AWS) version after conversations with lots of customers.
- moondev 10y ago
  I see, so it's a centralized control plane for spinnaker installation/upgrades. looking forward to trying it out! I've done a bunch of spinnaker + kubernetes integrations myself. Exciting space for sure.
  - imosquera 10y ago
    As of today, that is main value prop, however over time we hope to add other microservices to Spinnaker that will provide value on top of the control plane.

danielodio 10y ago

Here's a deeper dive on Spinnaker, and on how Armory is commercializing it for enterprises: http://go.Armory.io/Evaluate http://go.Armory.io/Evaluate

IgorPartola 10y ago
I love that there is a service named Igor. Could never find my name on a keychain or a door sign, but now I have a service named after me :)
- danielodio 10y ago
  ahaha nice -- you can learn more about Igor here: https://github.com/spinnaker/igor/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/spinnaker/igor/blob/master/README.md
- lintoma 10y ago
  We called it Igor because it was a friend of Jenkins. It's named after https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igor_(character) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igor_(character) . There is another service internally called Woodhouse

georgeaf99 10y ago

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. How y'all are planning to approach the cultural changes companies will have to adopt in order to leverage faster deployments?

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
imosquera 10y ago
We believe that DevOps encompasses 3 areas that must change: people, processes, & technology. We’re seeing evidence that the people/culture is already changing organically because companies must change in order to compete in the software era, and the velocity at which we see software-first companies entering traditional spaces like banking/finance, real-estate, hotel is also accelerating. That said, in order to make this rate of change to happen faster, instead of trying to convince people through debates, we have to show proof that moving towards a true DevOps model is successful, not just because you get to deploy more, but because it matters to the business. We want to show that CI/CD helps meet SLAs, new valuable features are added and allows the business to address new markets.
- danielodio 10y ago
  To add on to that: The best way we've found to work with large enterprises (aka Global 2000) is to start w/ just one team & app, show success with that, and then expand from there. We've found that big companies need to see one team achieving success before they'll adopt it throughout the organization. We've employed this approach successfully with our first several customers. They're going from from one app --> 5 apps --> "GA" rollout internally.
techcofounder 10y ago

devonkim 10y ago

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).

imosquera 10y ago
We believe that engineers should have access to deploy, manage and ultimately own their own deployments. This fundamental change is more commonly known as DevOps. In our interviews with over 100 enterprise companies, before we even incorporated the company, we observed a strong desire for teams to move in this direction. While we are aware there are many laggards, we’re making a bet, with Armory, that companies must move in this direction or die. That said, it’s an immense challenge working with the F100, which for some, don’t want to move in this direction yet. We’ve chosen not to focus those laggard companies. Even within our current focus, we’ve found that we actually can’t hire fast enough to support new customers who want to truly enable their deployment teams. And yes, it’s very much a “Wicked Problem” to solve but we’re hoping that with Spinnaker and market pressure it helps loosen those roots.