Jim Douglas, Armory.io | KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2023

This is texturing TV. Hey everyone. We're back here.

We're live in Amsterdam at kubecon wrapping up our day two coverage. I can't think of a better person to wrap things up with my friend Jim Douglas CEO. Armory absolutely and see how are you good?

You're so kind. I'm the only thing in between you and the end of the day. You know what?

I I told you off camera I could do this. I loved could you imagine I make a living doing that? I know right this heart.

This people were hard. I know for their life. Yeah me I sit here.

I talk to people like you all day all day that work hard. Whatever job. What a job.

There's Mike Resort there anyway, Jim. Let's start off. I said you receive Armory, but you've got a quite a resume.

Don't want to embarrass you but share with the audience a little bit about you patience offers been my whole career. So then in the software business pretty all facets of it. I started my career more in the technical aspects of software building software design semiconductors.

I've done developer tools. I've been embedded software now really focused on cloud software and specifically helping people really achieve scale with Cloud native software deployments. Love it now.

armories and company that I've been aware of for many years now. Not everyone out here is Gonna Know Armory. If you don't mind, let's just lay a little Baseline down.

Yeah, I'll give you the 30 second clip relatively new company, but our whole focus is helping people. Scout scale Cloud native with really high velocity but persistence stability and reliability. So how do you implement best and breed practices to really get to where you want to get in terms of as I said where you can be on command ready to deploy you can deploy with high frequency, but do that with really small downtime and really fast for mediation times.

It's what I love this drives for. Yep. and look I'll just you know way a background.

I first became aware of Armory as kind of the Spinnaker company. Yep, right you Armory was and for those who don't know again out here, right Spinnaker is probably one of the most scalable. Cicd more CD.

That's yeah, but cicd Platforms in existence. It was pioneered by Netflix and we'll go absolutely and it was donated to the CDF to continuous delivery Foundation. But Armory was the first company.

That really wanted to make Spinnaker commercial right? Because truth be told it was a bit of a bear. Yeah, you know unless you're a Netflix or Google.

We all can't be Netflix in Google. It was it was hard. Yeah.

Well, I was a start of our journey and the thing that's beautiful about Spinnaker as you know, very powerful very flexible platform and that can be daunting. But what's great about it is a couple things one is it allows platform engineering teams to build bespoke approaches to how they want to create pipelines the deployment scenarios that want to build and then deliver that to the developer teams internally so they can codify best practices and then Supply that to the developers. So it essentially provides you automated tasks that you can build into a recipe to have Best in Class deployment capability.

So that's how we started. Yeah, as you said we made that experience easier. We put a commercial kind of SLA on top of Open Source, we built a bunch of proprietary capabilities on top of it.

Are security for compliance for using pipelines as code making terraform easier making scale around kubernetes easier and that's been our bread and butter you're kind of leading into what's next and one of the things we're highlighting here. There's still a lot of companies out there that want to do that. They want to be Hands-On.

They really want to create that approach. Then there's companies that just want the results. They just want those best practices codified and delivered an automation.

So we have a new product that we introduced a couple months ago, which is SAS. It's not spinnaker-based but we took all of the best practices that we learned working with the most elite teams on the planet that have really leveraged that power Spinnaker codified that and deliver that in an automated SAS product where developers can just pick it up and it's gonna help them as I said reach the kind of velocity they strive for but persistence stability and reliability that they really need to achieve. Yeah, I was talking to He was the field CTO from morantis.

Like before we spoke with you right Sean Omar. And we you know, we talked about this concept of letting developers code not be plumbers. Right?

Right, and you said it right in the beginning? Look there are some organizations that relish being plumbers. They want to yep.

They want to plumb those pipelines. They want to you know map out that infrastructure. But having your developers do that.

You're paying them a lot of money to write code productive. Yeah, I mean, well, it's like I don't think it's the best bang for the buck. It's not and you see even companies that do want to be those plumbers.

That's the devop teams in the platform engineering team. Right? And that's what we've seen right and but they have different kind of use cases.

Sometimes they don't want their developers to even think they just want to provide them a solution where they can push a button and everything automatically deploys for them. Sometimes they'll give them recipes that they can modify. Some companies you said developers still want to be Hands-On, right?

But all markets evolve more towards automation. So early adopters tend to want to be more Hands-On as markets develop people are just more focused on outcomes. They want higher levels of distractions.

So that's what you're seeing from developers. You're seeing how they code move up and distraction and deployment they don't want to be able to spell it. They just want to make sure they can employ their code.

It's gonna land where it's supposed to and it's gonna run properly and if it doesn't It's Gonna Roll back automatically, they're gonna visibility into where errors worse they can correct quick and adjust so Future. That's the now that's where folks done now. Okay the future as you just keep adding as I said abstraction on top of that, you know, a lot of things people are all charged up about things like chat GPT.

All right, is that gonna be the next thing it's a ways off, but you'll see that in development too where basic things can be done through automation for you. And then your knowledge of architecture and how to optimize is where your value is going to add and that's what's happened in all forms of software forever. We just keep moving up distraction layers, let automation do more for you.

And as I said, we're doing that on the employment piece and we're going to continue to push that envelope, you know, someone much smarter than me. My friend Brad felt it's not very many people. No not he's much harder.

He believe me. Anyway, Brad smart guy like you. Yeah, huh.

Thanks. So Brad spelled once told me though. Very very little that happens in our technology World here is revolutionary.

It's evolutionary. Yeah, and to me what you're describing is exactly that. Yeah, it's not revolutionary.

You spent five years six years. Garnering these best practices from large spell large-scale Spinnaker. Yeah, right you make this into a SAS platform.

Now, we're talking about maybe applying some sort of generative AI or whatever they won't happen today. It may happen in a year in the future though. It will.

But again, it's gonna it's just gonna you know that t-shirt where apes turned into men kind of yes. It's that kind of progression. It doesn't you know it the days along the years are short when it comes to developing technology, right the perfect examples.

Like I said, what we're doing are SAS products you talk about some companies want to be plumbers and what you see is They can build bespokes scenarios of how they wanted to play and the strategies but at the end of the day we step back and you look at Elite teams, like 90% of the time they all have the best same practices. Yeah, and so that's we took that knowledge and just codify that knowledge now. how they implemented the way they Drove those best practices may be different but the best practices are the best practices and that's what drives the evolution and what happens is you move up somebody Builds an abstraction Above It generally isn't that good to start until you optimize it.

So at first everybody goes I can do it better. But at the end of the day it catches up and it can perform tasks better iterate iterate ingredient. Absolutely, you know, one of the lessons I learned, you know help I found it co-founded.

devops Institute 2015 very early on there were no best practices right for devops. They were evolving. Practices and I think that's another lesson that people got to learn is best practices.

Don't just tap up. Yeah, it takes time to say hey this works that doesn't work. This works a little better that doesn't and you know over a period of time these best practices emerged there are merging practice Yeah, and and I think the good news is We're kind of getting there now.

Yeah, right now we can put our finger on stuff and say yeah, no that that's the best way to do this. I think right now like when you walk around here and everybody you talk to it's get Ops, right? How do you think about developing using a git Ops approach or get Ops experience?

And then with that? Okay. What best practices do you add on to that?

Okay, great. I want to set up an environment with multiple environments and I can automatically deploy code and it's systematic way to those environments and I can roll back automatically if I've got issues. I've got ability to actually scale the multiple clusters to multiple regions.

How do you do that? What's the best way to do that people learn over time? I said the basics of doing Cloud native deployment.

The masses of people are now learning which are great five years ago. As you said, it's brand new story, right the cloud scale people understood how to do it. They wrote all their own tooling to do it that tooling is becoming commercial what they had to fight through and learn or now becoming the best practices at the Masters.

So we're trying to take those and automate those and deliver them to people today. Absolutely. Jim You could look into this camera right here for me.

I want you to tell people how to engage with this platform. How do they you know, what's the on-ramp? Yeah, so a couple things with our new SAS offering if you go to our website, you can actually download it automatically for free five minutes, you're set up and running.

It's got a sample application. It's got a sample kubernetes cluster. You can be playing code in 10 minutes from there.

If you want to take one of your own applications and play it great. The product itself is free for up to a thousand deployments. It's fully featured and then we've got a path where if you want a team to start using it you can matriculate into a commercial version and then we've got an Enterprise version as well that'll add in the things that you never step off teams will want like our back and single sign on and things like that.

io go in there. Try it for free. It'll also give you a sense of what our Spinnaker solution will provide for big platform teams that would prefer to build that out by themselves and really understand.

The flexibility you have to go create your custom Solutions, too. I love it. Great.

Hey, man, after pleasure you I hope let's not wait till Chicago. Okay, you've kind of talk again though, even if we do it over something. All right, thank all right.

I was pretty good times. I always a pleasure. io go check it out.

I think that's gonna wrap our day two coverage. We will be back tomorrow early day three final day. Congratulations.

You made it. Well another cubecon in the books on my way to RSA conference right after it though, but I'll probably see you there next week you're there. Hey, we're doing these all week stop by broadcast alley.

That's great. Fantastic. We're out.

Cheers.