Safe Continuous Deployment to Amazon EKS with Armory
Armory crew members Stephen Atwell and Dan Peach recently joined the Building SaaS on AWS livestream on Twitch, hosted by Gunnar Grosch, Developer Advocate at AWS. I highly recommend that you watch the episode here and then check out my personal key takeaways below in our recap blog.
About the Guests
Stephen Atwell is Principal Product Manager at Armory who enjoys creating open source garden planning software in his spare time. Dan Peach is a Software Engineer at Armory and his fun fact was that he played bass in a 90s cover band in college. I knew the first one about Stephen, but Dan’s fun fact was news to me!
What Did the Armory Crew Discuss in this Livestream?
Gunnar asked some great questions, so I highly recommend viewing the video for full context. But here are some of my own key takeaways.
- Solving the Continuous Deployment Problem – Stephen describes Armory’s goal to make continuous deployment simple. Taking 80% of common deployment use cases, the crew created Continuous Deployment-as-a-Service to fill knowledge, process, and resource gaps for development teams of all sizes. This goal resonated with me because we see the need in the market for tooling that solves the continuous deployment problem, not just another broad CI/CD tool.
- What Does “Continuous Deployment-as-a-Service” Even Mean? – To Stephen, the idea of “as-a-Service” means that a company creates, maintains, and delivers software in an ongoing, mutually beneficial relationship. Instead of handing developers software that they need to figure out themselves, Armory’s goal is to provide a simple, declarative experience that just works and can grow with the organization’s needs.
- Why Do People Choose Armory? – Most of our customers (and in fact many folks who haven’t yet used us!) are looking for simple, declarative deployments. They want consistency, reliability, and ease of use, which are all goals and outcomes of using CD-as-a-Service. These go hand-in-hand with also being able to ship more often using advanced deployment strategies. At Armory, we’re focusing on building a simple, scalable multi-environment, multi-cloud deployment solution that takes the stress out of a developer’s day and enables them to focus on what they do best: creating software.
- What Is the Most Common Pattern for Deploying Today? – The most common pattern seen from the Armory crew are custom scripts. These scripts are created by developers using tools like Jenkins, and are often brittle and not well-known by others within the organization, making them not scalable. Learn more about the custom scripting problem in our use case about scaling and custom tooling.
Architecture at Armory
Dan Peach then takes the reins to discuss the Continuous Deployment-as-a-Service architecture and how we solve customer problems who need to onboard hundreds of thousands of Kubernetes clusters.
I recommend you check out the video if you’re interested! He goes into great detail that might help you get a better understanding of how Armory can work with your own architectural needs.
Big thanks to Gunnar and the AWS team for having our crew on to talk about Continuous Deployment-as-a-Service. If you enjoyed Stephen and Dan’s takes, check out more of their insights on our blog. And if you enjoyed my take on their takes, why not check out my other blogs, as well!
- Armory Blogs by Stephen Atwell
- Armory Blogs by Dan Peach
- Armory Blogs by Anna Daugherty
