From Code to Cloud: Building a Golden Path to Production with Armory

In a world of rapidly changing customer preferences, fierce competition and shifting global events, the ability to pivot quickly has become increasingly critical. To help with this rapid change, we’re offering this excerpt taken from the ebook: From Code to Cloud: Building a Golden Path to Production 

Enterprises are investing in digital transformation and cloud migration initiatives to accelerate feature development, recognizing the advantages of public and hybrid cloud strategies. 

However, they’re finding that their deployment tooling, often built as an extension of their legacy continuous integration (CI), is one of the main impediments to adopting cloud services.

Legacy CI tools don’t just make it difficult to adopt new cloud services. Their heavy reliance on manual scripting, lack of automation and lack of purpose-built native continuous delivery (CD) features also open the door for unnecessary security risks and productivity blockers for DevOps teams. 

These legacy tools require an ever growing patchwork of plugins, which quickly becomes a costly maintenance burden. At the same time, they can slow down the deployment process and leave developers in the dark as to the status of their applications or the reason why a release was denied. 

With the growing need to change and adapt quickly, organizations are abandoning their legacy homegrown software solutions and adopting cloud-native continuous delivery platforms. 

“After adopting Spinnaker, we saw a substantial increase in the deployment frequency, and support requests reduced to almost zero.” – Alex Eftimie Staff DevOps Engineer Developer Enablement at GetYourGuide

Armory: Continuous deployment at enterprise scale

Spinnaker, a cloud-native, open source continuous deployment tool, provides: 

• Cluster management for configuring cloud resources 
• Deployment management to create and manage templatized software delivery workflows

Armory, built on Spinnaker, helps simplify and streamline the software deployment process at enterprise scale. Regardless of whether you use virtual machines, containers, Kubernetes, serverless or a combination of these, Armory helps you achieve continuous deployment by stripping away the complexities and risks of manually deploying applications to the cloud.

Spinnaker’s native integrations to deployment targets, supported and maintained by the major cloud providers, allow Armory to create “golden paths to production” with scalable, repeatable delivery pipelines that are leveraged across teams and organizations. These templatized deployment paths leverage automation to reduce manual steps, getting software to market faster and with increased safety. 

“Spinnaker is an enterprise-grade, open source project that is utilized by a number of our customers to improve their developer teams’ productivity. We’re happy to contribute to this critical OSS project and look forward to continued work together with Armory.” – Deepak Singh Vice President of Compute Services Amazon Web Services

Seamless, resilient application delivery

Armory offers a variety of solutions designed to increase developer efficiency, productivity and velocity while reducing or eliminating the risks of manual, custom-scripted deployments. From application-centric visibility into the production pipeline to features like canary deployments for resilient deployments, Armory helps developers own the production pipeline end-to-end.

Policy-driven deployments

• Integrate security policies across the development lifecycle for a unified DevSecOps approach. 
• Utilize Armory’s Policy Engine, backed by the Open Policy Agent (OPA) to codify security and compliance best-practices.
• Automate policy enforcement, change management auditing and role-based access policies across all deployment pipelines.

Software delivery acceleration 

• Simplified tooling keeps developers focused on delivering innovation instead of maintaining complex custom tooling and glue code. 
• Faster feedback loops tie outcomes to code changes, enabling rapid iterations while the code is still new. 
• Holistic views of deployments provides a single pane of glass view of cloud and on-premises infrastructures across multiple targets.

Cloud and Kubernetes migration 

• Standardized deployment workflows across application teams provide a golden path to production with flexible guard rails. 
• Blue/green deployments allow developers to spin up and redirect to new production environments, without shutting down the old environment. 
• Target-agnostic deployments are purpose-built, making it as simple as clicking a button to deploy software to the desired targets.

Optimize the development lifecycle with Armory’s proprietary Spinnaker features:

Armory Policy Engine 

Codify and automate security and compliance policies across the entire deployment pipeline. View a https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SMB3aSk3XA here. 

Armory Scale Agent for Kubernetes 

Deploy to hundreds or thousands of Kubernetes clusters with ease, performance and security. Learn more about Armory Scale Agent.

Armory Secrets Management 

Manage secrets and protect sensitive data using a secrets store, such as Vault or encrypted Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets. Read about our partnership with AWS here.

Armory Pipelines as Code 

Dynamically create and store Spinnaker pipelines as code, enabling version control, templates and modularization in pipelines. View a Pipelines as Code demo here.

Deploy Armory how you need it, where you need it

Armory offers a few options to best meet your organization’s unique business needs. 

• Learn more about our full list of continuous deployment offerings on our Products page.
• Request a tailored demo, scope success criteria for a proof of concept or learn how to get started with Armory.