Jyoti Bansal on Harness’s Acquisition of Armory

This is Textron tv. Hi everyone. Welcome here.

We've got some breaking news on Textron TV this morning. I'm really happy to be joined by my friend Ti Bonai. Jody, if you don't know, is well, he was the founder of AppDynamics, which was of course sold to Cisco a couple years ago.

He's the CEO of harness. He's also the CEO of a great API, uh, security company called Traceable or Traceable ai, and it's a, so he's dual, CEO. He's the classic serial entrepreneur.

Jody, welcome, welcome back to Techstrong tv. It's great to see you. Yeah, great to see you, Alan.

Nice to have you on. So, Jody, uh, let's get right to it. You've got some big news you guys are announcing today over at Harness.

What is it? Well, what we are announcing today is, uh, that we are acquiring assets of, uh, company in our space, uh, called Armory. Armory was a company that was built on open source project, spinnaker for continuous delivery, uh, to simplify and, uh, automate deployments.

Uh, a lot of similarities with the harness flagship product, which is continuous, uh, delivery as well. Uh, harness, uh, launched the product in 2018 in the market, uh, around the same time Armory launched the product on top of, uh, office Spinnaker. And, uh, uh, today we are announcing that we are acquiring the assets of, uh, of Armory, which is their customer base, their ip, uh, and also, uh, we are hiring a lot of their, uh, engineers and, uh, and customer facing, uh, uh, uh, technical people, uh, to join, uh, to, uh, to join Hunts.

That's fantastic. Um, so this one is, is a little bit different in that it's, it's more of sort of an IP purchase. You're, you're purchasing the intellectual property as well as the customers and, and then you are hiring the Armory folks.

It, it's not your typical acquisition where, or you know, where they, where they have, in other words, they don't, they no longer work for Armory, and you've now hired them assuming they want to be hired, right? And, and, and that's done. Um, I, I feel obligated to give a little bit of, of DevOps history here, Jodi, right?

So, look, CI/CD has become for many the, the centerpiece of DevOps, right? That's what DevOps is. Uh, and harness is what I call a leader in the next Gen CI/CD space, right?

If we think of the original CI/CD, sort of as like Jenkins and of that age of that, you know, generation Harness was one of the first next Gen CI/CD products that came out there, more CD than ci. And that, that's a story for another day that CI doesn't necessarily go with cd. But as you said, around the same time, uh, the folks who were behind, uh, armory were taking spinnaker.

And if folks aren't familiar with Spinnaker, Spinnaker was originally developed, I think by Netflix and Google, Netflix mostly. Yep. And, and, you know, you want to talk about scalable cd, it was scalable for hyperscale type of environments.

Of course, it was very Netflix specific, and, and it was, there was a lot of work that needed to be done to take it from there to productize it. And Armory did a yeoman's work. The, the folks at Armory, it's been, what, five, six years, right?

They put a lot of work into making that product a product, not just a project that was great for Netflix. Um, I believe it was part of the CDF foundation as well, wasn't it? The Continuous Delivery Foundation, nikker was put over in there.

Sure. They, they, they were, uh, harness was part of CD Foundation as well. You know, most of the companies, uh, in the space, we were collaborating together as part of CD Foundation to, uh, uh, you know, to help the industry here.

But, uh, thanks for the history. You know, you, that's, that's, that's, that's, uh, uh, you're, you're right. Like, you know, most people started, uh, CI/CD with Jenkins.

And the way I always, uh, you know, uh, look at it like, you know, there was a big disservice happened for a long time that people put CI and CD in one bucket almost all the time. And there were like two different, um, problems to be solved. ci you've enabling developers to, you know, integrate their change into the main code base and test it, you know, CD or deploying the production continuously.

And what people did was like, you know, people solved the problem of for CI with Jenkins, you know, not the, the, the best solution, but at least, you know, that was, there was a solution for that cd. Most people build their own homegrown scripting based, uh, deployment systems, uh, that people wrote a lot of scripts, whether this was like, you know, back in the day would be like, you know, shell scripts and then Chef and Puppet and ible and all kinda stuff to automate the deployments, you know, they will use a little bit of Jenkins, et cetera. But on top of that, mostly it was homegrown scripting.

And that's where the, the next generation CD systems came in when, you know, harness, uh, are brought to the market, um, you know, where you don't need to write scripts, that is, it's, the deployments are all declarative. You declare how you want to do it, you know, and it could be very sophisticated deployments, multi-cloud deployments, blue-green deployments, canary deployments, uh, uh, you know, you bring security governance because you need all of that for deployment and production, which is not as, as as needed for CIE. But when you, when you're looking at cd, so security governance, uh, uh, compliance becomes a huge element of, uh, you know, uh, production deployment systems.

Uh, and, uh, you know, harness also brought in a technology called continuous verification, which is how do you, uh, can you bring AI to, uh, to ensure that deployments are not going to break? You know, and by the way, I'd like to remind everyone that, uh, a everyone talks about AI and everything right now, but when Harness was launched in 2018, that was our primary secret sauce. And that, you know, we bringing AI to continuous deployment, uh, so that we, the, uh, um, you know, deployment on break and Spinnaker project was started a few years before Harness, uh, harness was started, you know, and, uh, you know, so they were, we were kind of going and parallel of Spinnaker was a little bit ahead.

A lot of, uh, companies chose spinnaker because products like Harness didn't exist at that time. Uh, over time, like, you know, we definitely have a lot of respect for, you know, what Spinnaker, uh, you know, started as sort of the, the first PR play CD product in the mar in the industry, which, you know, came out of Netflix. Before that, everyone was building their own deployment systems.

So that was the first attempt of like, you know, productizing cd, you know, uh, from what Netflix was doing into, into this clinical project. And, uh, uh, you know, so definitely a lot of respect for that, you know, harness started a few years after that. And, you know, over time, we, over, over the last five, six years now, we have become the, the leading platform for continuous delivery.

We have, you know, uh, 600 customers and in, in like large companies who are heavily, uh, relying on, on harness from whether it's like large banks, you know, uh, we just had, uh, you know, Citibank for example, published a case study a few weeks ago of like, you know, how for, for, you know, a a a, a bank of their scale, you know, tens of thousands of developers, you know, harness CD is streamlining the deployment, uh, processes for them completely. So we, you know, we, we have become leading platform for, for, for it for some time. And, you know, uh, we, we look at like, you know, in, but the, the Spinnaker and then Armory on top of it, that those efforts were going in parallel.

And, you know, we think it's, it's great convergence in many ways to bring some of the, the talent from their, you know, engineers who were working on building CD at, you know, with Spinnaker and Armory into the harness fold, uh, you know, also provide continuity to the customers. You know, we, the, the arm, the, the Army customers who wanted to make sure they're in a, they're in a, in a great place. They get, you know, continuity of service, uh, they get, uh, you know, uh, so we are bringing a lot of the engineers from Harmony to continue to provide that.

And Harness has a very, very stellar track record for world class con customer service. Like, you know, we, we, we take a lot of pride in it, so we want to continue to, uh, drive that to the, to the Army customers. But we do expect and hope, like in over time, many of the Armi customers can move off seamlessly to the harness platform and harness platform, uh, you know, started to cd, but it has grown to a, you know, a, a broader DevOps platform.

Now, we have 12 different modules in our platform, you know, from, uh, you know, CD was our first, uh, module. Then we added ci, uh, we added feature flag, we added cloud cost management, kiosk engineering, security testing, uh, software, supply chain assurance, infrastructure is code, you know, um, uh, code, uh, uh, code repo, uh, you know, so we have, we have, and, uh, you know, uh, software engineering insights, uh, we have a broad platform, and we ex, you know, we hope, uh, uh, many of the, many customers, not only they get, uh, you know, next generation CD and Seamless, uh, migration, but also, uh, access to up to the broader DevOps, uh, uh, solutions. Yeah.

I'm listening to you rattle off those modules. I think we covered every single one as they were launched. So they're, they're all pretty familiar to me.

So, Jody, I, I know you've, you've, well, not, maybe not you personally, but the harness team has already reached out to the Armory customer base, tucked them in to make sure they've, they know they're loved and secured, and, and their software's not gonna be, the rug's not gonna be pulled out. How long, and again, there's a hard question, but how long do you think it'll take until this sort of a, a smooth migration path, you know, to the mainstream harness platform? So we'll continue to support the Army customers the way it is right now.

Their implementations, uh, will, will support, uh, you know, we expect, like, you know, that we will help them through a more of automated migration. So, uh, over the, over the, over the next six months, 12 months, maybe, uh, you know, in some cases it could, could be, uh, could be longer. Uh, but that's, that's what we expect.

Okay. And, um, I, I feel compelled to say on, you know, tech Crunch around historian, a couple of the other places jumped out early and they, they mentioned the purchase price here was $7 million. And look in today's market, that the ip, you know, that that's, that's the reality of where we are in today's world.

Um, approximately how many Armory people are coming over, do you know? Or is that something you're not giving out? Uh, about 20 people from Armory coming over, That's a decent amount of their staff.

That's a decent portion of their staff. Um, well, first of all, Jody, congratulations. Right?

I, I think there's a tremendous pickup for you and the harness team, right? There's some good technology there. It's for the CD space, it's almost, you would call it mature technology, right?

And, and 20 people, you know, even in today's market, it's still 20 good people who are familiar, you, you know, with the CD space and, and those are premium people to come by. So that sounds like a bargain to me. Um, how, as long as I have you on, you mentioned some of the modules.

How is the, uh, the, the open source GIT repository you guys launched doing? Was it Git List, right? Yeah, Git, uh, you know, it's going extremely well.

You know, you're hearing so much positive feedback. You know, it's, what's special about Git is, uh, it's very lightweight. You can download and run it on the, you know, the smallest possible laptops.

The experience is very simplified and streamlined. So developers love that. Uh, you know, it's, uh, uh, it, it also has a, you know, very easy integration to the, uh, to a build process, like to a, to a ci that there's pipeline element it.

But the, the more, uh, very importantly also, we, since we designed it, uh, from ground up in the last, uh, few years, generative AI is built in very seamlessly everywhere. Like, you know, every, everything from how you search for code in the code repo, and you know, everything that you, all your experience, I is very AI assisted, so it makes it very, uh, you know, uh, sort of a next generation experience. So we are, we are, we are very happy with the response, you know, just a few months.

We have, uh, we have, um, I think more than 50,000 downloads now. Really? That's great.

We have, we have a lot of, uh, love on GitHub around it, you know, that's where our, you know, it, the code is hosted and, you know, uh, uh, tens of thousands of GitHub stars on the, on, on, on the, on the, That's fantastic. Uh, Jody, I wanted to, while again, while I have you, not necessarily related to the Armory acquisition, but you know, a lot of people saying 2024 DevOps is old. The, the, the, the, the, the, the, the bloom is off the rose.

You know what I mean? It, it, it's not everything we thought it was gonna be, or some people say DevOps is passe. It's old school already.

It's, it's dead. It's about platform engineering and about this and that, and the other thing. To me, nothing could be further than the truth.

I think DevOps is recognizing its potential by being built into the way we deliver, build and deliver software, and maintain software. I mean, obviously you're, you're the CEO of Harm harness, but what do you think, You know, first of all, I would say, um, you know, I do think we are getting into this next era of DevOps. The, the, the, the previous era of DevOps and, uh, was homegrown DevOps that you have to build together, DevOps, you know, uh, cobble together, DevOps to work, and, you know, yes, you have to get the culture part right, but a lot of the, the tooling and how do you get there was just not, you know, uh, the, the was a lot of work.

The next era of DevOps is, you know, how do you, how do you automate through platforms that can take most of the, the work off you, so you can focus on building the code that, that, you know, you're as engineering teams that you're primarily tasked to do and less about, like, you know, the, the, the how to deploy, how do you build, all of those are kind of taken care of. And that's where the, the rise of platform engineering teams and platform engineering groups make a big, uh, you know, uh, make a, make, uh, play a big role as well. Uh, harness launched as you, uh, as you might recall, one of the new modules we launched was our internal developer portal, uh, internal developer portal that, that brings it all together to, for, for developers to like, you know, how do the onboard new applications, how do the onboard, you know, new engineers, you know, how do you get like, you know, one click and you get your CI/CD pipelines and you get like, you know, your infrastructure is code and everything onboarded with a few clicks through high degree of templatization, reusability, shareability.

And we do believe, like that's where it has to go. Like, you know, it's a, all the, the effort and toil that comes, uh, you know, with DevOps has to go away. So that, I call it like the, that's kind of the, the high toil DevOps era, moving to this kind of more streamlined, low toil kind of like, you know, run by a, a sort of a platform engineering group that's offering these services to the, the developers with, with, with very low toil.

That's the next era. So, you know, dev, you know, it's just that DevOps is a, is a, as a phrase, I don't know what's going to happen to that. You know, it probably will, will be there for a long time.

But the, what, what I'm excited about, and I do think that is needed to happen, was, uh, kinda moving DevOps to this more intelligent, automated, low toil, uh, world. And, and, uh, we, we believe harness is at the forefront of it. That's what we have been driving for the last four or five years.

And I, I, I, I, I see like, you know, uh, 2023 to some extent, and 24, 24 now is like, you know, that the, that shift is happening and that shift is happening through this more automated intelligent DevOps. Love it. Again, we're, we're about outta time, but Jody, congratulations.

Sounds like a, a smart move here with, with the Armory assets. We'll be watching for continued news and, and developments out of Harness as you continue to lead here. And, and best of luck, we both with Harness and Traceable.

Hey, thank, thank you so much. Always great to, uh, to chat with you here. Alright, Jody, Jody Vanai, CEO of Harness announcing their acquisition of the assets of Armory Network as well as CEO of Traceable.

Can check 'em both out. com? It's Bioo Harness or bio Io.

Excuse me? Yes. Alright.

Thank you for joining us for this special edition of Text Drunk tv. We'll go back to our regular, uh, interviews now. Bye-Bye.