Cost Saving Automation – Anna Daugherty, Armory

This is Textron TV. But the great pleasure being joined by Anna Doherty who is senior product marketing manager with Armory. Welcome, man.

I'm Edge. Thank you for having me glad to be here glad to have you on well tell us a little bit about yourself and tell us about about what the good Folks at Armory do. Well like you said thank you.

I am a senior product marketing manager at Armory and if you folks don't know what a product marketer is. Um, I heard about story last year that said 2022 was the year of product marketers. So you probably got a lot of resources to go and catch up on that that's my role.

But at Armory We Are The Continuous deployment company and we have solutions for developers of any size any scale organization. We're really priding ourselves on on being able to serve both very large Enterprises all the way to start ups and mid-market. So we're very much focused on continuous deployment and telling that story in the market.

It's great good folks and we sometimes getting to the continuous deployment part of cicd is a little okay. Now, how do we do that? Phone, right?

Mm-hmm. Absolutely. Yeah, and we've seen that too.

Like we've really locked down what continuous integration is. We've got a bunch of really great best to breed tools in the market right now, right and developers are loving them and then you know, we've gotten a handle on continuous delivery. We preprocesses going we've got our tooling, you know, pretty well set but it's that that switch from manual to automated and the confidence and the risk aversion and the testing right?

That's what we're really focusing on enabling and making it so that there's fewer creaky hands going on in the market and a lot more people being able to take advantage of the benefits of continuous deployment. There's a big human part of that. We have many years of learning, you know, check check double check triple check.

Okay, we're ready to go. Can we back it out right throughout a career some some newer careers some older and we have some unlearning to do or new learning to do me learning that way you say it. Well, let's talk about I'd love to get your thoughts about sort of the economic Times and what's happening in the market.

You know when when things become a little dicey or not sure, you know, there's uncertainty in the market or we know we're you know, we're seeing this happening and maybe some reduced revenue or customers are tightening that wrestle that stuff. You know, there's always the well, let's tighten our belts and you can kind of save yourself out of business you've tightened too much but also customers invest and oftentimes it's reinvest or or shift their investment and what they're doing to propel themselves and okay if that markets a little tough here, this is what we're going to go do and this is the business goal to go do it. Like about that for us from your perspective.

Yeah absolutely loves you. So 2022 was the year of product marketing 2023 is the year of the Mantra do more with less and you'll see that everywhere right? But the emphasis we like to put on it is do more.

You know, even if you have to have less there's still a way to maximize your business spend to get the most value out of the tools the processes and the people that you have at your organization, and we understand the less right? We we ourselves feel that pain and Armory, right? Everybody is and so we took that pain and we said what can we do with our toolset to help developers feel more like they're generating Top Line value at the organization and less like they're focusing on you know, operational things or things that aren't contributing to that market impact that business value what the organization is striving to do like you said, so we do see that again the tightening is there but there is a real opportunity for tools solutions that are going to help enable the more part of do more with less.

I know in the 2008, you know kind of struggle right the financial struggle, you saw a lot of investment in organizations that were sort of keeping their heads down, right? And they said, you know, we'll get through this. We just have to be smart.

We have to invest in Innovation and we have to get ourselves to the next level when we're going to come out of this and be successful and Studies have proven that those organizations took off after their recession was over. So I think we're seeing that same thing. We have to really focus on what are we doing?

How do we align everyone around what we're trying to accomplish and then how we make it happen with fewer resources at our disposal? So I I'd label the other side of your coin the year of product marketing. The year of software is our business strategy.

Where is our Innovation? Yeah, absolutely you back office Folks by the way, you're on the front line of us. We're not back office anymore.

Great news. The great news is yes, you're not back office. So, you know in a way a lot of organizations in difficult times will reinvest in R&D creating product doing things they want to do to accelerate their development.

Unfortunately, if if we've invested in devops and tooling and and cicd in particular, that's a great place that can help us accelerate getting that value out to Market. We might have to Pivot and shift and do some something different than what we're planning. But that's all the better if we've got the right kind of process and tools and people to support that so it isn't just do less.

It's let's get a lot more done but let's get the right things done we have Less flexibility for error or you know waste or whatever it might be. Yeah, absolutely. That's that's a great way of putting it and and that's something we really think about thoughtfully from the developer's perspective because you know in their case they might say I'm not waste right.

I'm not inefficient. Maybe I just don't understand what we're trying to do from a larger perspective. I really see this narrow focus of I'm making this code.

I'm going to make sure it gets built and put somewhere right? What is that next step for me? How can I deliver value with what I'm creating?

We want to connect to those pieces and that's a lot of what devops is trying to accomplish right is to connect the pieces together for people contextualize what you're building and how it contributes. But I'd Armory were very much about you've made the thing that matters to the business. It doesn't matter.

If no one gets to experience it if it's not always available if it's not continually in the place where people can use it and if it's not delightful to use if it's not, you know always up. It's not stuttering, you know. So yeah, we really believe in helping those developers see the you know their efficiency and their work is not going in vain.

It's a it's going out to the places where it's going to drive value for your business and it's gonna always be there and you can you can we like to say don't be afraid to commit. Okay commitment. No, no fear commitment commitment.

And and don't worry about the deployment. It'll be there at the end up. Well, you know one of the when earlier in my career, well, you're not that long ago people get very frustrated developed very frustrated.

Like I worked on this so hard and then we don't deploy it because shifts economics whatever happened, but if you were moving to us, you know smaller pieces of work getting that out into production, but it does not to be you know, everything's a microservice. You can do that with, you know, I'm the cloud native software else so But you don't have those like I just committed a year and a half of my time and it never meant anything because you know, it took us too long to get it out, right? 100% And I think that's that's a great cultural shift for developers.

And I think it's a great cultural shift for that sort of middle of the devops lifecycle. Right? Those sort of the people in the ecosystem who have previously sort of been that checkpoint or the gatekeeper, right?

And so they it's never fun to get to a place where you have to say. No, we're never going to release this thing or we can't release it as it is. We can't get it out there as it is because of whatever compliance check whatever security didn't pass whatever testing wasn't done.

Whatever gatekeeping they have to do that's a pain point for them too. Nobody wants that and that's business waste you wanna talk about waste that middle section can be just a waste of everyone's time when they couldn't really be, you know, automating some of those steps focusing on driving value. In other ways focusing on developing new Innovative threat detection, you know things things that could actually drive business value instead of check marking against every piece of code that's supposed to go to deployment that's where we really enable that middle section that gatekeeper section to not be that way to step back from that sort of everyday Toil and contribute more to the business.

You know, it's it's a good point because there's a sort of this inflection point if you will in the middle of that process where we relied on checking and speaking and the other eyes looking at everything the manual part process part of it to the point if you've got enough flow in your system. Delivering software and you've got some some acceleration some speed to it doesn't have to be lightning fast, but you get to a point where yes, we have all that and I'm confident in our testing in 9 out of 10. It does extremely well and we do have exceptions.

But if you can respond fastly when fast when you get into production fastly it's not a word. Well you can respond quickly when you get into production you find a problem and correct it versus I need to back everything out and that takes me a weekend, you know kind of problem you can you can put more confidence in the I know we're gonna do it right almost every time and when we don't I know we can fix it very quickly. That's a different world than check check check really and then release and then it still breaks and then we're still having issue after all it all back what we love.

We love at Armory our Advanced deployment strategies that are risk averse right and preventing risk and yet still allowing deployment to happen. And so, you know our Advanced strategies like blue green Canary. We're really really advocating for those types of strategies specifically Canary deployments.

We think have a lot of business value, especially with service. Mesh those Integrations allowing to take it all the way down to 1% at a time imagine being able to Not just wait for that big release check mark check mark check mark and then deploy all at once. One percent at a time sending traffic making sure it's working.

and then all the way to a confidence level that's shown to you to be healthy, and then you can just Continue, right and it never it doesn't break. It doesn't interrupt your flow. It's just automated.

It's healthy. It's checked at every point and it you have confidence that it's running and then you don't have to wait for some notification to tell you that something is broken. That's what we've also seen as being a waste of time as you know, something that's gonna make your customers and end users very angry if they got this big, you know update and everything's broken making you something happen and then you have to start finding developers to say.

Oh you're on this team. This thing's broken, right? There's a lot of that wasted time and effort from that sort of roll back process.

I call it roll back process because that doesn't seem very efficient either but with that sort of canary deployment as you're going that one percent by one percent health checks at every point. Eventually, you're at a point. When a majority of your traffic is already flowing.

Right, and so he yeah you let's say you get 75% incredibly confident and you say I want to wait for that another 25% I want to get the rest of my traffic on this application you're there. you are immediately aware of something has gone wrong, but it probably won't because you're very confident and you don't need to be notified because it's Going right you're not waiting for that big cross your fingers moment, but something is wrong. So that's helpful.

I think for that devops person who isn't waiting around, right? They're not they're not waiting around for something to break or they're not waiting around to to notify some team that they you know have to go hunt for to say. Oh you're associated with this application.

That's breaking. So yeah, I think it enables that person to focus on what matters which is delighting the developers and our organization, right? We just did Canary deployments for you, right?

How did you feel about that? You know, did you did you find that? It was really helpful.

Would you like to do more of those getting adoption and new Stitch within the organization? Very powerful that's sort of the light bulb for me about The Cloud of it's not just other people's computers. It's I have resources.

I can do things like now we can do it Cloud native microservices and service. Mesh. I'm curious what what are maybe some of the questions or topics that are coming up?

In now kind of the over the last see four to six months that weren't coming up before sort of things started changing on the economic fronts. What are people asking you're talking to you about? Yeah, some of the big ones I'm hearing are we want to innovate in new organizations new areas new environments and we have solutions that are only You know one environment to one environment one to one or you know, very strict and and imperative and we need more flexibility to be more Innovative and to accelerate and we're especially seeing that in sort of your what we want to say, like multimedia streaming sort of places or places that deliver value all over the world.

They they need to have the same level of service and uptime all over the world. As you would expect here. Right people's expectations users customers expectations are continuing all sorts to accelerate that can meet them where they are.

And so we're getting a lot of questions about geez. I don't know how to do that. I have I have a a deployment methodology.

We've built it maybe we've homegrown it maybe we have, you know, an open source tool like Argo which is is very much not multi environment driven, but we've built custom scripting on top of that. And how can we still deliver value? How can we still deliver innovation without wrecking our entire system that we've built right?

Because that's gonna be a cost too and we are we don't have that time and money to spend on that operational cost. How can we fix or improve what we have currently to be able to enable us to innovate across the world seeing that a lot and people are trying to expand right? There's a lot more opportunity internationally than just here.

Yeah, the business folks are not too often very likely, especially in more challenging times to see us terrible that down scratch be nice to but often that's that's pretty rare you get to do that. So building on top of the other advantage of the stranger talking about Anna is you can build on top of what you do. Well, right, you don't have to always do it differently.

You can take what you do well and x and accentuate it. Yes Designer Delivery process if that's how we what we do excel at then. Let's amplify that and and make it even quicker faster velocity Etc.

And making sure that the tools that you do have work well together. And if they don't identify what's slowing you down and if it is, you know an open source tool like Argo. Well, what why is it slowing you down?

Oh, we figured it out. It's because it's it's not multienment orchestration. We need that let's find a tool that works well to deliver that with us and that's what Armory does we work really well with a lot of different tools and our go we help them orchestrate multi environment releases and deployments.

So we're very much like agnostic in that way. We believe and supporting best of breed tools that help developers deploy better. But we also believe we have strengths that can.

I don't know enable that work to be more effective across your tool set. There's there's like this reaction. From the market to either shrink down all the way.

You know, we only get two tools. Right or consolidate to a platform because of volume discount right or usage discount and you know, that's not always the answer in times of economic Strife. I would say it's it's an answer, but it might not be the answer for you depending on what your business goals if your business goals are Innovation your developers are where your Innovation lives.

And you need to enable them to be fast efficient safe reliable in their deployments. Well fantastic tell us where folks can find out more about Armory and some of the things that you're talking. Absolutely.

I'd love to well first I'll point you to if you were to Google the phrase continuous deployment cost savings my colleagues Steven Atwell. He's a product manager here at Armory. He wrote a fantastic article about how to change the business via continuous deployment and how to continue to run your business by a continuous deployment.

io is our website highly highly recommend. You visit us check us out. If you have questions, we're always willing to talk.

We're always in the Spinnaker slack. So if you're using open source Spinnaker, we have a lot of folks our Architects and engineers and that's black answering questions all day every day. So check us out.

Vinegar some great great open source great conference too. Okay. It is awesome.

And of course, I'm sure you have, you know sandboxer for accounts or software and yeah, check us out. We got free driver friendly, right? Yeah.

You can try continuous deployment as a service for free anytime all the time. Fantastic. Well great, and I'll be sure to put a link to that article that you talked about your colleague written that in the description.

So well Anna. Thank you Anna Doty who is senior product manager with Armory. Appreciate you coming by and hope you will stop back again soon.

Absolutely. Thanks for having minutes you bet.