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Launch HN: Armory.io (YC W17) – We Make Deployments Boring and Self-Service

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Launch HN: Armory.io (YC W17) – We Make Deployments Boring and Self-Service

#1
Hi HN, I’m Isaac, co-founder and CTO of Armory in the YC W17 batch. Ever had a deployment fail only to find out it was impossible to rollback to the previous version? Or get paged at 2am when the user experience is broken?

Armory.io makes deployments boring (like ‘waiting for your code to compile’ boring), non-events that happen continuously, and always in the background. We do that by simplifying the installation and configuration of Spinnaker - an open source continuous delivery platform from Netflix.

We all worked together at our last company and experienced the pain of scary deployments with low engineering velocity. When I became the SVP Engineering there, I decided that needed to change. We broke a brittle monolith app up into microservices, started deploying with Kubernetes, and created a CI/CD pipeline that allowed us to go from deploying just a few painful times per month (taking weeks and multiple manager approvals to deploy) to 2,000x deployments per month, continuously. The cascading effects were that we started working on parts of the codebase that had been stagnant for years because we were afraid to touch them (the original developers had long left the company). Here’s a screenshot of a chart that shows the delta: http://drod.io/43452e3V0N28 — each color is a different microservice; you can see how those blossomed as we broke the monolith up and started deploying each microservice on the cadence that was best for it. And we had much happier engineers, too, because they could see their code running immediately in production, and they took ownership of it running successfully in prod (as a side effect we went from a traditional ops team to a no-ops approach).

We were so passionate about the transformative effect this had on the company that we started Armory to bring it to any company — which is especially needed in large, low performing organizations that typically deploy just 7x per year (compared to 4,000x per day at Netflix).

We’d love to hear your stories of deployments gone wrong, hear your questions about Armory, or anything else on your mind!

Re: Launch HN: Armory.io (YC W17) – We Make Deployments Boring and Self-Service

#5
post #4

spinnaker as a service. pretty cool idea. what is your planned pricing look like? spinnaker is not cheap to run yourself. Also I tried the "try spinnaker" link and it looks like it timed out at armory.formstack.com

Ben is going to talk about the 'as a service piece' in a minute. Here's pricing info: http://go.Armory.io/pricing

Re: Launch HN: Armory.io (YC W17) – We Make Deployments Boring and Self-Service

#6
post #4

spinnaker as a service. pretty cool idea. what is your planned pricing look like? spinnaker is not cheap to run yourself. Also I tried the "try spinnaker" link and it looks like it timed out at armory.formstack.com

I'm one of the cofounders of Armory. Thanks for letting us know of the timeout - we're looking into that now.

Today, our enterprise version of Spinnaker is hosted within your AWS account, not truly hosted Spinnaker as a service, although we def plan to offer that down the road. Our current customers have told us they prefer to run Spinnaker inside their own accounts b/c they fear data leakage.

Re: Launch HN: Armory.io (YC W17) – We Make Deployments Boring and Self-Service

#8
post #4

spinnaker as a service. pretty cool idea. what is your planned pricing look like? spinnaker is not cheap to run yourself. Also I tried the "try spinnaker" link and it looks like it timed out at armory.formstack.com

I'm one of the cofounders of Armory. Thanks for letting us know of the timeout - we're looking into that now. Today, our enterprise version of Spinnaker is hosted within your AWS account, not truly hosted Spinnaker as a service, although we def plan to offer that down the road. Our current customers have told us they prefer to run Spinnaker inside their own accounts b/c they fear data leakage.

Btw, I realize our website still has "hosted spinnaker" as a product offering. It was the first thing we built, but as mentioned above, we pivoted towards an "on-prem" (in your AWS) version after conversations with lots of customers.

Re: Launch HN: Armory.io (YC W17) – We Make Deployments Boring and Self-Service

#9
post #4

spinnaker as a service. pretty cool idea. what is your planned pricing look like? spinnaker is not cheap to run yourself. Also I tried the "try spinnaker" link and it looks like it timed out at armory.formstack.com

While we're not currently hosting it now, we did start with a hosted solution which is why it exists on our website. Engineering leaders were hesitant to give access to their AWS accounts so they wanted us to bring up Spinnaker in their accounts. Sometime in the future we do intend to revisit hosted Spinnaker.
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