State of Deployment Practices – Anna Daugherty, Armory

This is texturing TV. Hi everyone. Welcome back to techstrunk TV.

Our next guest is the First Time guest here on techstork. She works with Armory the the people Who really brought Spinnaker? To a lot of Enterprises as a commercial offering but more than that.

It's on Anna Daugherty and there is a senior product marketing manager with with Armory. Hey, Anna, welcome to text drunk TV. I am thanks for having me.

It's our pleasure to have you on here. So Anna. Well, let's hear a little bit about your story.

I'm sure oh great. Well, thank you for the introduction. I am a senior product marketing manager at Armory as you said and if your audience is familiar with product marketing managers were sort of that odd in between between the product team marketing the customer and and bringing Market insights into the product development.

It realizing product development. So yeah, I've been doing this for about five years now. I absolutely love it.

But before that I've been in technology marketing for 10 years. I started in video games now. I'm in software as a service hard tech.

Yep, you know, it's interesting. It's not with not today. But at some point we should put together a panel of product marketing people agree talk about their job because it's misunderstood right A lot of people.

Well, first of all a lot of people in Tech here marketing and they shut down. Yeah, they turn it. Yeah, it's just like and yet I know many many CMOS who started their careers as engineers and probably have more code committed than most of the developers watching us today.

But on top of that product marketing is you said it's a whole different animal because you said it the Nexus of product. customers and marketing and and really, you know, it's It's the place where information comes in and gets sort of analyzed for what we need to do with product. And what customers are saying about using our product and how do we better tell people what the products capabilities use cases and so forth are on 100% Absolutely.

Well, I've been around a while anyway and Anna. Of course you work for Armory. I briefly said, you know, they brought Spinnaker.

To many many Enterprises and that's probably what their best known for. But another thing they're known for is every year. They do a pretty good report that I've been following for a couple of years and this year's report is out.

I understand. Excuse words. Yeah, we we tripled the the production right three for the price of what three for the price of one which is free.

So we we decided to really widen the scope of the types of people. We were contacting about this report. You know, it's usually it leaders devops leaders.

We also wanted to take it to developers. And so we wanted to split up the report based on the insights. We got from about 400 respondents.

And so the three reports are continuous deployment in software development. Enterprise scale deployment. So that's your it leaders devops leaders ctOS and then pain points and risks for developers in software deployment.

So we thought by splitting up the audiences we could get some really good insights across the gamut. I I agree with you so I look as I said, I've been in this space a long time and doing this a long time. I always feel with reports.

There's always at least three or four. big bullet points that kind of convey You know the overriding themes here. I'm sure this is no different.

Why don't we jump into them? Sure. The one thing that I would encourage everyone to take away from these reports from it leaders all the way down to developers is that reliability is the number one thing everyone is concerned about so more than 80% of respondents in every single category said they care about software deployment reliability.

Employment might be the number. One thing that a company would be concerned about right to you know, make sure their software gets there before the competitors do to get it to the market faster. That's what a marketer might be concerned with.

But your it leaders are not that concerned with that if 82% of them are saying we care that our software is deployed reliably that we know our software is there for our customers therefore end users. We don't have to you know roll back. We don't have outages and I think that's that's incredibly interesting that that's so consistently feedback.

We got from all of the respondents. Absolutely. Well, yeah, I'll be honest.

I'm not surprised. I think we're liability. You know, it's funny.

I I tell this to my children. I tell it to our employees here. You could be the greatest what you do whether it's coding or marketing or product marketing or You know name it, but if you're not if we can't count on you to be reliable showing up getting the job done.

Right then it's all it's often not right. So to me reliability trumps them all. But anyway, go ahead that that's a great start reliability.

Absolutely. Yeah, and it Down to trust right? There's there's a contract of trust that you're building with your users.

And it's like you're saying and in real life you care about that person is going to show up you can trust them. And so I thought I found that incredibly interesting and then when you get into the Nitty Gritty of the folks who are doing that work every single day, what do they care about? They care about the ability to deploy frequently, right?

So you want to be able to create your software code it get it out there but not have to worry about the number one thing that they're concerned about with their everyday job, which is too many manual steps. So more than 50% of respondents in the developer category said that's holding me back too many manual steps in the deployment process. It's a bottleneck.

It makes my life a living heck and you know, it's it's keeping them from doing what they really want to do, which is not devops. It's coding. And so I think they care about reliability, but they also care about their own personal, you know experience with development employment.

I agree. It's a good good second Point any difference between the different audiences on the on that one. Oh between what metric of success is for an IT leader versus a developer?

Yes. So the the metric of success for developer is deployment frequency and Metric of success for it leader is reliability and uptime. Yeah, it's funny because you know.

You would think you'd want? You know consensus on what is most important. Actually very much by how much personal pain you have to experience in those manual steps where an IT leader is an experiencing that every day, but they do feel it when the software is down.

They do feel it when people when customers can't access their application. No, you would look. Yeah.

I actually did an interview on another report recently. And you know, they would touting it like it was a big surprise about downtime being so expensive. And so yeah leaders even it's been like that for as long as I've been in technology down times bad right down times bad.

It's absolutely it's not, you know need a PhD in in or an MBA to know that so I I think sometimes people lose lose sight of that and that quite frankly is one of the nice things about, you know, CI/CD and pipelines and using tools and devops is Look, if something happens you want to be able to roll back really quickly. Right and coming increasingly that's becoming increasingly complex with multi-cloud environments. Yeah, deployment targets Regional deployments everything starts to get bigger and bigger and more complex.

And that kind of where Armory is really focusing our attention. We really care about you know, obscuring that complexity for people making it very much from the developer side of the house one. Click automated steps get rid of all the manual processes so you don't have to worry about that.

And then from the the leadership perspective making sure that it's streamlined and that all of that complexity is taking care of so if there is a problem you can roll it back without any concerns about, you know, not missing without missing an environment or you know, yeah, that's our big thing is making sure we can cover what everybody cares about at each step. Excellent. All right.

Let's go to our third point. Sure. So I think our third Point here is when you when you really bring it all together and you think about okay we know developers care about their everyday and We Know It leaders care about reliability.

What does that mean in practice and it means brand so we really thought about it and we came away with the understanding that if your site is where your application is reliable You're Building trust and if you're developers care about your brand, they're creating good software deploying it without a problem. And so you're you're increasing your scale of your brand and doing it in a way that your users can trust. And so we thought that's really important to highlight.

What scale means here. So scale in you know, the past has been really thought about as technology your performance, right? Oh, you can scale you can throw more recess resources at kubernetes.

That's scale. This report shows us that that's not just the case. It's technology plus people plus processes And so when you have those three things together, you're creating strength and scale.

So those people those developers who are experiencing those pain points when you can remove the pain points for them that makes them scalable. Those processes when you can remove the manual steps and add Automation and testing directly into the pipeline and the workflow that becomes scalable and when you have technology that obscures the the complications and the complexity and does isn't homegrown or just scripts, you know, tossed on some open source software that becomes scalable. So all three of those things together are incredibly important and that's that's contributing to the strength of your brand.

I'm great. And I've learned as a you know, I've been I'm a CEO here. Obviously, I've been at sea levels.

For 20 plus years. You're only as good as your weakest link just when it leaves to that. So we look at people processing technology.

You could have the greatest technology in the world. If you're Peter processes, or your people can't do it. Exactly and so when we talk about scalability across all three, it's a lowest common denominator right that that kind of grounds you so and even in here at Tech strong, right?

It's something we've learned to kind of live with so Yeah. time to Here, you know your devops leaders are going to really really look at technology performance and we want them to do that. But we also want them to assess those other two categories because you're right if you can identify the processes that are weak links not just in your team, but in teams across your organization, that's when you can start to see those patterns that are keeping you from scaling.

Absolutely agree. All right. Those are three big things what else interesting in the report.

Do you want to bring up with the audience? Well, I would say there's a ton of great information from all the way from the Leaders all the way down to developers check this reports out. They're free.

io and look at them. I absolutely encourage you to do so because you'll learn a ton. io, which is it's AR a r m o r y God I O and right right off the front page.

We have page. There's a little Banner read more. You can read about our deployment reports and download them as well.

Yeah, you can download them. You can read them right on the page really easy to access. We don't want to gate them.

We wanted to make them available because we think this is really important information for everybody. Absolutely. Hey, and thanks for coming in and joining us today and telling us about the reports come back anytime and keep us posted on Armory.

Okay? Absolutely. Thank you so much Ellen.

Appreciate it. Thanks for inviting pleasure. And a diary with Armory here go check out those reports.

io. Good good stuff in there. We're gonna take a break here on Tech strong and we'll be right back.