Armory + AWS: Continuous Enterprise-Scale Deployment for Every Organization [WHITEPAPER]

Armory accelerates deployment to Amazon Web Services (AWS), reducing time-to-market and improving customer experience.

What does a competitive advantage for your business look like today? Delivering innovative software with speed and efficiency and creating exceptional customer experiences.

Software should enable—not impede. Organizations must innovate quickly to meet customer demands and cannot afford to be slowed down by development bottlenecks and downtime. It is essential for software-driven organizations to meet customer expectations with a balance of speed and innovation—and that means the ability to scale with velocity. Anything less can mean failure.

It’s complicated: The challenge of scaling quickly and efficiently

However, those twin competitive pressures of speed and scale have created significant complexity—challenges rooted in a combination of rapid infrastructure modernization and evolving market demands. So, while Dev and Ops are still part of the same family—those dinner table conversations can be tense. Dev has traditionally met the demand for velocity and innovation with home-grown tooling scripts held together by the proverbial gum and a shoelace. Ops wrangles rising risk by enforcing a growing list of processes that can choke innovation and speed—the very lifeblood of a company’s success. 

To thrive, DevOps needs a unified solution that:

• Delivers new features and products to customers quickly and reliably
• Aligns software delivery with their hybrid or cloud strategy of choice for maximum efficiency and cost optimization
• Minimizes cost, complexity, and the threat of downtime
• Remaining secure and compliant 

For many, continuous deployment is the game changer. It enables DevOps the means to confidently test, deploy, and rollback software on the fly–reliably, safely, and continuously—and now it’s available as-a-service and at scale from Armory.

Armory provides consistent and compliant deployments that support multi-target environments, which eliminates costly delays in time to market. Whether your team is big or small, Armory frees developers to focus their efforts on writing code rather than deploying it—paving the way for innovation.

Let’s take a deeper look at how continuous deployment with Armory delivers competitive advantage.

Accelerate innovation with automation and agility 

Innovation is table stakes. The pace and scale at which you need to deliver new features and products continues to accelerate. If you falter, if downtime slows your progress, your competitors will beat you to market. 

We understand that your customers expect always-on access to software and services. However, with 70% of outages caused by updates, it’s clear why true continuous deployment, where you can deploy software safely and securely and with the  velocity your business demands, is crucial. 

Arguably, that’s easier said than done. Maintaining alignment between deployment and the business as you scale, often with multiple vendors and disparate solutions adds significant complexity—especially when deploying to multiple targets across environments, often across multiple regions.

This complexity has been reported as a key challenge by of organizations surveyed in Armory’s 2022 Enterprise Scale Deployments report, with IT decision makers citing multi cloud deployments being too complex (62%) as the top issue that needs to be addressed with their app development and deployment. The need to simplify is obvious.

Agility is key.

Software development agility rests on building a streamlined approach that allows for automated, repeatable deployments. Standardization also decreases risk, by ensuring environments that should be operated consistently are operated consistently, while remaining flexible enough to handle the increased output derived from scale.

By abstracting away some of the common cloud infrastructures that can decelerate your deployments, Armory simplifies and streamlines the deployment process.

Automation-enabled agility also bolsters the bottom line. A 2020 McKinsey report, Enterprise Agility: Buzz or Business Impact, has estimated business agility improves financial performance by up to 30%. Manual or resource-intensive software delivery processes can lead to inefficiencies and errors. When deploying to your AWS targets with Armory, you can automate your delivery throughout the software development lifecycle – from test to stage to production. With a single pane of glass, you can gain important insights into your application health that helps to inform your deployment and scaling decisions, providing your teams with the visibility they need and allowing you to scale with agility.

Those insights do more than optimize efficiency and lower cost. Organizations that deploy into multiple regions also need to meet the myriad demands of security and compliance—adding yet more complexity to those twin challenges of speed and scale.

That is why Armory offers easy security and compliance integrations so that nothing slows the train down. Rather than burden teams with creating evolving policies and procedural steps that can slow software deployment, we integrate automated security and compliance capabilities throughout your entire software development lifecycle, ensuring end-to-end policy enforcement to give your developers the freedom and flexibility they need to deploy with velocity. 

Finally, continuous development is imperative for lessening the burden on your development teams. Let’s face it: They prefer to develop rather than maintain. The capabilities of automated, continuous development free developers to focus on—you guessed it—further innovation. Continuous Development as-a-service, is not just good process—it’s good business. 

Opening new markets at speed

From green buildings, clean cars, and smart manufacturing, Autodesk knows that innovation is the cornerstone to its global leadership in design technology. They knew that to move quickly into new regional markets, it needed a platform that automates building, packaging, testing, and deployment and began to look for ways to supercharge their deployments. They chose Armory running on Amazon EKS and deployed on Amazon ECS and Amazon EC2. 

“We use many of the products that AWS has to offer, but unifying deployment tooling under Autodesk’s CloudOS with continuous deployment technology was critical for our regional scalability,” Shrirang Moghe, senior software architect at Autodesk, said. As a result of this partnership, Autodesk was able to confidently reduce deployment time in a new region from a few months to weeks. 

Glovo, a Madrid-based tech startup grew from serving 3 countries in 8 cities to more than 22 countries and 300+ cities in less than ten years, and could have easily become a victim of its own success. Its AppDev team quickly realized that it could no longer keep up with its monolithic application updates as it continued to scale and turned to Armory to support their transition to a Continuous Development pipeline via Spinnaker and AWS.

The move to automation netted transparency and agility, spiking confidence among the engineering and scoring some impressive results: 

• Increased deployment to eight times each day, with 2,000 deployments within the first year.
• Reduced its change failure rate from 20% to 5.4%.
• Reduced recovery time from hours to an average of two minutes.
• Enabled a 90-minute feature turnaround time.

But results like these are not limited to enterprise users. Upwave, a brand analytics firm with fewer than a couple dozen engineers, was able to use Armory’s Continuous Deployment-as-a-Service, to transition to fully-automated deployments to all environments. In addition to decreasing errors and increasing the velocity of deployments, what really sets Armory apart is how streamlined and simplified its platform is. 

“The main benefit we’ve realized in adopting Armory CD as a service is that we have converged on a simpler model of continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD), which enables us to do more,” Christopher Baldwin, chief architect at Upwave says. 

It is easier, it is simpler, and we have more functionality. Simply put, it raises the bar for quality across our engineering org as a whole. 

Armory and AWS provide a robust pathway to innovation in the cloud. When scale, speed, and security matter, automation and agility are critical to the success of organizations of any size. Minimize inconsistencies and increases your team’s productivity by storing pipelines in GitHub and manage them in the same way you would manage code.

Through purpose-built continuous deployment tooling, Armory enables you to focus on increasing business value rather than managing yet another platform or building a new deployment script from scratch. The powerful capabilities enable development teams to simplify and speed up software deployment to AWS, accelerating time-to-market and improving customer experience.

Get started with Armory and AWS today on the AWS Marketplace.