Adam Frank, Armory | AWS re:Invent 2022

This is texturong TV. Hey, we are here at AWS re:invent 2022 in Las Vegas. And at our Tech strong TV studios set up in the win in a special suite and we're doing a lot of great conversations with you know off the show floor so we can talk to each other and have some good conversation not have to talk over a whole bunch of other people, you know, hitting the booths and all that.

So very pleased to have Adam Frank join me today. He is VP of product management and design with Armory. Welcome man.

Thanks for having me. It's pleasure to be here. Well, tell us about yourself.

Tell us a little bit about Armory great. So Armory is is really specializing in continuous deployment knowing that that's a huge struggle for a lot of customers out there big pain point for developers. I'm really making sure that we can focus in on the the cross environment orchestration of it and Progressive deliveries, like blue green and canaries really assuring the customer experience for everybody and accelerating their software delivery timelines is kind of the at the root of it.

A little bit about myself. I've been you know on the on the devops side of things mostly on the Ops for for years and years more recently switched over to the dev side of things but it's a space that I am very passionate about, you know, right from from a childhood memory actually and I quite enjoy it nice to be it's always going to bring the the good experiences maybe a few of the scars along the way start actually living it and doing it which is awesome. Yeah.

It's interesting when we talked about continuous deployment. Everybody starts on cicd usually at the CIA part of it and there's sort of that emotional or mental aspect of automating deployment. And what do you what do you think is kind of thing to help people get over that?

I'm gonna do this automation. I'm not going to do it by hand or you know manually stopping the process every time. I think it's the the sheer amount of breaks that happen, you know time and time again, you hear about outages and you know, this happened and this happened and just the fragility that is all the customizations that get extended on top of CI systems CI systems are great.

They're absolutely necessary, but they come with a lot of flexibility where people start to build that last little bit of deployment and they were never designed for that. So I think it really comes with again just the amount of outages and breaks and things that happen and people get frustrated with it and it forces them down the path of truly automating it that and just the testing and Security scanning aspect of it, you know. Nobody wants to manually log into something manually run some tests.

They want to write code. They want to write code. They want to see where that code's been deployed.

They want to understand what that experience of that code is and so it gets back to just kind of the root of that is being able to write code and deploy that code and get back to writing more great code when the more more great code you write smaller bits and pieces microservices or whatever. The CD can be the next bottleneck too. Right?

So push through that and sometimes it's the work coming or the code coming that helps you say let's let's figure this out and do this, you know, the automated deploys absolutely absolutely. Well tell us about what's happening in the show for for Armory. Yeah, so it's been a great show so far.

We've got a very nice conversation started with our t-shirts. Obviously not afraid to yeah. I didn't know if you had a special Therapy Group happening too.

Well, you know in our line of work, I guess there might be a little bit of that. I need some of that out. Yeah.

No, I mean it, you know, there's that notion and you hear time and time again that people are afraid to commit on especially on like Fridays, you know, we don't do any deployments on weekends things like that. So we kind of came up with you know, it's not be afraid to commit here. Let's let's trust what these tools are doing and and allow them to to do what they were they were intended to do.

So, it's been a really great show for us so far. We've got lots of really great conversations. We're showcasing in a new product that we release back in in June, you know, really focus there and deploying out to the kubernetes space a lot of conversations there kubernetes is obviously kind of taking the World by storm.

So it's it's been a lot of really great conversations with people and and it's just great to get out and see what competitions doing what other vendors are doing as well. All and and finally get together in person and meet all these people. This is like the immersive but non-virtual the true immersive expense, right?

That's right. That's very well said it is very immersive. Okay, right now it is sometimes a little too mad.

Well, I'm curious so, you know, there's tons of tools to choose from different parts of the devops workflow tool pipeline to solve. Where do you usually people get to let's work on continuous deployment take that next step obviously see I needs to be in place and sometimes people work on other parts of it automated testing. Is there a typical place where you kind of get to that point?

So now it's time Yeah, definitely the CI, you know, they've practiced CI they've gotten there with with CI. And again, I think it comes back to you know, they've extended CI and in one form or another to be able to do deployment. I think when we look at a lot of delivery and deployment Solutions out there they may have been architected in a way that fits one technology another whether it be kubernetes or whether it be services on in on AWS and where we really come in as being able to scale across all of these different services and making sure that scale it, you know to us isn't just about the performance of an application in this case our application.

We don't just say our application performs. It does most certainly but scale is also are you scaling your people officially, are you scaling your process is efficiently and that's really where it comes down to being able to leverage something like continuous deployment to be able to scale your people efficiently your process efficiently and of course your software efficiently so people, you know, especially in today's day and age with the economy need to need develop for productivity. Cost savings.

So these are a really big things that are happening in the environment. They look to ways to do that and continues deployment can certainly do that since it does absolutely help, you know, grow your business your product and scale everything efficiently a lot of focus on developer productivity because of Economics talk like you mentioned the tool or the release that you had come out during the summer with kubernetes talk about what some of the special challenges are you had to address thinking about how to deploying kubernetes environments. 5.

That's what I mean. Look at, you know startups and you know, we had to talk to a couple of our smaller customers and you know, they've got 10 different environments and they're looking to grow that depending on the different applications that they have 21 and a half is a lot. So it's really the challenges are how do you Allow automatic promotion from one environment to the next to be able to achieve true continuous deployment.

You can deploy out to a single environment. And and then what then you go back and you do something manually, then you deploy it to another environment but you want that whole thing orchestrated. So one of the biggest challenges was really trying to figure out how to orchestrate that being able to do that at any scale and being able to not only be able to do that automatically, but also give people a path to be able to achieve doing that automatically if they're not quite there so being able to put things like manual approvals in so they can go in do something manually they have today that is on the list to automate once they've got that test or that security scanning whatever it may be automated great.

You can remove that that manual approval you can just have that automatically continue and you know promote the next environment the next environment so on and so forth. I think another thing to tell me if this is correct, but I think the continuity through automation, right? You don't have changes interjected into the process or if you need to make improvements.

You can roll those out as part of deployments too. Because the time you if you're gonna play across 20 environments how they all gonna be done the same. Hopefully but if they're automated much greater chance of consistency across those environments, yeah, most definitely and you know, I just finished having a fantastic lunch with a great engineer from snap and one of the biggest problems that he was talking about was the the rollback, you know, they've kind of got the deployment solved at this point, but it's the actual rollback especially when they have really tightly coupled Services.

Everybody just wants that big red rollback button, you know, but bring me back to that state and he was going through edge cases over and over again where the rollbacks just don't happen in the way that they need to so that was another really big hurdle is to figure out how to actually just give that one click really big button that is rollback and it actually does roll back to that known good State really quickly to assure that customer experience. It's interesting when you've got that capability. I don't think we always think about this as technical people.

It actually gives the business people more flexibility, maybe even more confidence of taking more risk. that Nope. No problem.

You okay need a drink. I have a level that's water. Actually.

Yeah. Well, thank you. We're good cut this out.

We're not live. So you're fine. There's some dryer.

Yeah, I love that when that happens mid-sent. You're like, yeah, I can kind of feel it good feel it coming on. Yeah, we do.

We need to have like the emergency water right there, right? There we go. Take your time.

We got plenty of time. That's why we need to roll back because we're choking. Yeah, so it's it's all good.

Yeah, not a problem. You need a regular look at that, you know Ricola that's perfect. If you want to drop all set him off the side here if you need to drink water while we're talking that's fine.

Yeah, I've got my drink ready here too. So. Here's looks a little nicer than mine.

That's all right. It's not a beer. It's a cold.

Okay. Are you still rolling guys Okay, so Perfect. Yeah, okay, great.

I'll start in three two one. You know you're talking about rollback and it's interesting. There's the technical side of rollback.

We need to get go back to what we're doing because of some problem or issue. The business folks actually having that capability enables them to take greater risk because now they know if we have a problem we can get back to where we were it isn't okay. It's something happens and I want to pull this, you know off the shelf off the digital Shelf.

So to speak they've got that capability. They know the technical teams can do that very quick. Yeah, the technical teams have their back.

That's right. Absolutely. Yeah, and that allows them to really move faster and we talked about the the smaller changes that are being deployed out there.

So when those smaller changes are happening like that those rollbacks are going to be a little bit easier and the business does have a lot more faith in the technical folks ability that so it's a match made in, you know, nice little Harmony there kind of symbiotic but anything else from the show stand out for you so far and just us being able to get together and talk about the cool things that you're doing with Armory. I think just the the sheer size of it this year, you know, maybe it's been a few years. I didn't quite remember.

It seems like you know, just the sheer size of it and a lot of people really really going to kind of all out this year with advertisements and and parties and and get togethers and things like that and just really really great conversations that are happening in and around the booths and and you know, we've got Jay frog right beside us, you know, really friendly banter with a friend besides and good folks too. Yeah, it's great. It's great to see everybody out.

Great. Yeah. Well, yeah, we're kind of back to critical math.

I think again, I think so. io. Absolutely.

Yeah, very good and there's free your trial or test accounts or yeah. Yeah. We've got a free trial.

We've got a freemium that's there as well, you know staying within those limits. You're welcome to use that as long as you as long as you would like to And so yeah, you can definitely get there and try everything out. We'd love to have you try out love to get that feedback and and hear all about what you're up to great.

io. Check them out. Thanks for being here.

Thanks very much. Thanks for having me bad.