Armory’s New Solution for Kubernetes Deployments

Project Borealis is our new SaaS offering that enables intelligent Kubernetes deployments. Borealis manages deployments across all of your environments and supports production-ready strategies (e.g. canary deployments & blue/green deployments) to keep you safe. It simplifies common patterns we’ve seen helping our customers succeed. Along the way we’ve learned that not all companies need the full power of Spinnaker, and some would benefit from a simpler and more prescriptive approach.

How does Project Borealis extend Kubernetes Deployments?

Borealis manages delivery to all your environments, and ensures environment-specific controls and tests pass before code reaches production. Within an environment you can easily leverage a canary deployment strategy to ensure service quality. Canary deployments increase safety by verifying a service is healthy before sending all traffic to the new version. Borealis checks your service health and can rollback if an issue is found.

How simple is it to get started? Borealis provides a command line tool to deploy from your existing CI system. We also provide deeper integrations for Spinnaker and Github Actions, further enhancing the experience for users of these platforms. You will use helm to install a lightweight agent that allows Borealis to connect to your clusters. You will then define rules to which your deployment must conform, such as requiring staging to update before production. Typical design partners have done canary deployments in under an hour after getting access. To learn more checkout out the demo on our youtube channel.

Will a SaaS solution be reliable?

Some companies are hesitant to leverage SaaS for continuous deployment because it is mission critical. Armory aims to maximize uptime and reliability even during early access. We measure uptime through a synthetic test that actively deploys software. This means that when we say we are up it means you can deploy, not just log in. January was our first full month measure our uptime, and we had 99.971% uptime. 99.9% availability is widely regarded as very reliable, and 99.971 is better than many cloud services. This percentage means Borealis had under 13 minutes of downtime. To ensure our stability, we use Project borealis internally to deploy itself. This helps ensure that if something goes wrong we can quickly restore service–in fact it helped us be in the elite tier for all Dora metrics.  Is your current deployment pipeline this reliable?

Getting Access

Today we are inviting companies that are not already Armory customers to become early access design partners for project borealis. Design partners must be willing to meet with Armory for up to 1 hour per week for 6 months. They will review borealis plans and provide feedback. Design partners get to use Borealis for free before it becomes Generally Available, and for up to 1 year after. They will also have the opportunity to influence our roadmap. Signup here to help us craft a deployment solution worth loving.