Continuous Delivery-as-a-Service – Adam Frank, Armory.io

This is Textron TV. Hey guys. Thanks for the throw.

io. And we're talking about the rise of continuous delivery as a service and then what's going on with spinegar and these two things are kind of orthogonal to each other, but we'll see how things go from here. Adam.

Welcome to the show. Thanks, Mike. Always a pleasure having me on here.

So what is the level of adoption bin of the CD as a service platform that you guys launched before we get into spinner? And what are people saying about that been at it? I think since June so where are we that's right pre June.

We had a design partners program that we had spun up to really give some Early Access to some customers of hours and some new customers of hours. So that program went very very well. We saw, you know a few different size companies anywhere from small to medium and a couple of our larger Enterprises really starting to leverage CD as a service and then we launched it early June of this year.

And since then we've continued to see momentum take off. I think there's a real place in the market for people that want continuous deployment as a service and not have to install anything within there environment. So we've gotten really really great feedback this far.

Are there any patterns in the types of customers that lean towards consuming CD as a service versus those that want to do it themselves? The patterns that we are definitely seeing are companies and organizations that really want to just focus on their core competency. They want to invest in more engineering and more resources that are focused solely focused on their core competency.

So they'll leverage SAS Solutions like hours in this case CD is a service to make sure that we as a as a continuous deployment company here focusing on our core competency and delivering that service to them so they can focus on their core competencies. I think, you know, we've talked to a number of these customers and they could have done it. It could have taken significant resources.

It could have taken significant time. So they certainly did not want to focus on that and just wanted to focus on their business. I think that's the the common theme there in the meantime, you guys are still investing and Spinnaker, right?

That's a whole other platform that stands apart from this one. So when do people lean towards vinegar versus Be as a service platform where we'll spinegar eventually be delivered as a service as well. Where are we in that Journey?

Sure. So Spinnaker has been around for a number of years and we've seen and we continue to see really large Enterprises and and really Elite development teams Leverage The Power of Spinnaker the power and that flexibility. So we're still seeing that Trend.

We're still seeing a lot of large Enterprises a lot of deployments a lot of deployment frequency and that are really looking to scale out their deployments and we've got customers that have thousands of deployments per day thousands of developers running on the platform. So we do see the community continuing to grow. I mean, there's you know, a few 100 installs a month that we see there's so many more contributions that we see within the community.

So people are continuing to leverage Spinnaker at that but it's definitely on the larger Enterprise side of things. Whereas we're seeing people that are more focused on kubernetes. And looking for that simpler declarative type offering that are looking then at CD as a service with us.

You think CD is a service will expand the number of organizations that Embrace best devops practices because it becomes more accessible. Yeah, I think so. Absolutely.

I mean the more accessibility are there more accessible these types of things are we know we were saying in the beginning there people can focus more on their core companies and start to have an easier time when it comes to devops as a whole so the devops platforms that we see platform engineering team starting to build out especially the ones that are leveraging CD is a service on our side, you know, they they tend to be able to focus more time and and you know build out different services for their engineering team and their businesses. So there's a lot of a lot of success a lot of Merit there. Three years.

We used the term ci/cd as if it was one integrated thing when in reality, it was a lot of CI and maybe a very little CD. Is that changing and what is the relationship between CI and CD how tightly coupled are these things going to be going for? I think so.

I definitely think so. Like you said it was a lot of CI and and very little CD we saw back, you know, we still see it out there quite a bit you'd have a lot of CI and then and some you know, a lot of scripting and things like that that are built onto it to do some type of little deployment. But as people are investing more in service reliability and service Assurance security things of that nature really looking forward to delivering a solid customer experience.

They start to look at their deployment strategy and how we can leverage Advanced deployment strategies like your blue green your Canary automated impact analysis to really help with that customer experience. So there's Point Solutions like CD as a service that we are offering that do deliver that for them. They're very very tightly couples.

I mean CIS, I believe focused on the build and test aspects of everything so you do have that artifact to deploy and then deployment of course is focus. Heavily on deploying those artifacts and making sure that they're deployed in a safe and reliable manner out to your customers. So you can continue to deliver that solid customer experience that you know you and I as customers are expecting the software that we use.

Do you think that becomes easier to achieve because in a kubernetes environment at least there's a consistent set of apis and one of the things that's held us up in CD. Is that every platform up until then was its own little snowflake so there wasn't a lot of consistency. So people just rely on a lot of manual effort.

I think kubernetes as a whole has really taken its foothold as the number one orchestration platform. So it's becoming more wildly known it's becoming certainly more wildly adopted and there is a lot of really great power when leveraging kubernetes. So this is really allowed us as a company to deliver a solution that's focused on the deployment to kubernetes, but there's lots of other services out there that people are still still leveraging, you know, there's lots of serverless services as well that people are leveraging so there's certainly need to deploy out to these Services as well and we'll continue to see it involve and I'm excited to see where kubernetes and you know the kind of the next iteration of all this continues to evolve as well, but we'll always have deployment needs and those deployment needs will continue to be at the Forefront of everybody's business and strategy going forward.

Do you think we're at some seminal moment in time where people are looking at their legacy approaches the devops and they're seeing the rise of microservices kubernetes different kinds of work blows more concern about everything from security to how the whole software supply chain is maintained from Integrity perspective and our people taking a moment now and saying hey now is the time to rethink our whole approach and kind of modernize that I mean, we have some organizations that are running the same platform for close to a decade now, right? I think so. I do.

I really I really do think so. I mean we know we're seeing customers approach us at this point and we're you know evaluating what they've done with them and partnering with they've done with them and like you said, it's a platform that's 10 years old at this point and you've got a 10 year old platform that you've home grown within your organization. There's gonna be a lot of different pieces in that to it and that eventually becomes pretty convoluted and and fragile.

So people are absolutely looking at that and you know devops now, I think people are really starting to embrace it as a culture whereas before it was just you know, I, you know, are you working in a devops manner you work in an agile Manner and it's not just an agile Manner and a framework that you are working in but it's really embracing it as a culture to help bring development and operations closer. So you are Delivering a better customer experience and making your developers lives easier and really leveraging a lot of Automation in there as well. What does it take to get people to have that realization to move forward because sometimes I think we make a decision four or five years ago and was the right decision at the time but the technology moves on but we never revisit that earlier decision because we kind of get wrapped up into the inertia of the platform in the process.

So when is that aha moment when people go you know what I got a thing we think this whole thing top then I think when it comes down to efficiencies and you've got two things, you're really focused on you're delivering that customer experience and making sure that you're developers are enabled to deliver that customer experience. So when the developers are really lacking a lot of efficiencies and there's just so many pain points and what they're doing. They're still manual steps or things just aren't working.

If you interview any developer out there, they'll tell you that they just want deployments to work. That's they want to get down and and write their code and they just want deployments to work. So I think the AHA moments really come into consideration when things just get too frustrating or the customer experiences is really starting to be hindered by the fragility of the platform.

That is that is that has built What do you think the relationship between developers? And the rest of the devops team is going to be like going forward as we get CD right? Because a lot of developers some want to control the entire stack others.

Just want to write code and hand it off to somebody else. So what's going to be the right mix over time is this going to be some sort of Continuum? That's a that's a great question.

That is a very great question. I think what we're seeing is exactly like you said, we've got kind of two different types of personas there. You've got somebody who really just wants the deployment to work and they've got everything facilitated there for them.

So they're writing their codes. They're committing that code and that deployment is working. Then you've got some other folks who are kind of in embracing a little bit more of that control and want to understand a little bit of the underlying infrastructure and and, you know piping as it were So I think we'll continue to see that for quite some time.

I think platform engineering as a whole is becoming a lot more popular, but we'll continue to see that and I think you know, what we've done with CD as a service certainly is is focus on that developer experience so they can understand the underlying piping the underlying infrastructure, but it's also still easy to them. So not only can they understand it but it is easy to them as well as making it easy for that platform engineering team to serve out to serve up the services to them the apis to them so they can leverage it and like I said just commit their code and really have a tightly coupled, you know back to the CI and CD using GitHub actions as an example, you know, fantastic CI we'll plug right into GitHub actions commit your code and then that's gonna completely take care of the deployment as well. Almost sounds like we're at the fork in the road where we have a devops late option and a devops heavy option.

You can pick either one. Is that kind of what we're looking at? It's not a bad way to look at it.

Yeah, that's not a bad way to look at it. All right. So what's your best advice to folks in terms of how to make that decision and get started down One path of the other I think depending on how large your team is.

You really want to make sure that again, you know said it here a couple of times you're focusing on your core competency. You're not spending a lot of time building out a CD solution a CI and CD solution when your business is to build out another type of software or service for customers. So I think make sure you're leveraging something like CD as a service that and just makes your life easier.

All right, the devops journey is never quite done Adam. Thanks for being on the show. Thanks a lot Mike.

Appreciate it. All right back to you guys in the studio.