Armory Continuous Deployment Self-Hosted and Managed v2.28

Introducing Armory Continuous Deployment Self-Hosted and Managed version 2.28

As I contemplate the current economic situation and observe the industry trend of  companies tightening their budgets, I’m reminded of the fact that some of the most amazing products come out of teams who were brave enough to build and innovate during challenging times.

At the core of Armory is the spirit of community and the power that comes from a group of people who share the feeling that bringing new software into the world will solve big problems and enrich the lives of those around us. It is my belief that teams who stay true to their values in moments of adversity are always rewarded even when facing the challenge of choosing a harder path. 

Expanding the Product Line

At the beginning of 2022, the Armory team became reinspired by the Spinnaker community and its mission to not only focus on Armory’s new declarative offering, Armory Continuous Deployment-as-a-Service, but also to make significant investment in both Spinnaker and Armory’s enterprise product, which builds on and contributes to the Spinnaker open source project.

To accommodate the release of Armory Continuous Deployment-as-a-Service into our growing continuous deployment solutions, we have renamed the self-hosted and managed offerings of Armory Enterprise as follows:

• Armory Enterprise becomes Armory Continuous Deployment Self-Hosted
• Armory Enterprise Managed becomes Armory Continuous Deployment Managed
• Armory Agent for Kubernetes becomes Armory Scale Agent for Spinnaker & Kubernetes

Introducing Armory CD Self-Hosted 2.28

At Armory, the product and engineering teams have a shared instinct to innovate and deliver new features.  After speaking with customers and analyzing the market future of Armory CD Self-Hosted, it was obvious that concentrating on the stability and quality of our product was the next best step. It was important to us to invest in the reliability and performance of that fundamental piece of platform technology, which our customers use as a highway to bring delightful software into the world. 

The guiding principle of stability and quality led us to the release of Armory CD Self-Hosted 2.28.0. This long term support product release encapsulates all the amazing optimizations, features, and fixes from the Spinnaker community, and raises the enterprise grade quality bar.

With this release, we have stayed true to our commitment to capturing increasingly complex use cases to ensure solid releases, as we worked on v2.28! 

Here are some highlights:

1. Test Automation Infrastructure: We’ve invested heavily in our test automation infrastructure, capturing and covering new complex use cases that emerge from our elite users as integrated platforms evolve. We also added numerous automated unit, integration, CVE, and end-to-end tests that fire on each commit from OSS Spinnaker or the Armory CD Self-Hosted product features.
2. Optimized Release Process: The team optimized the release process to allow for incremental and iterative changes (Short Term Support releases) as needed, culminating in twice annual Long Term Support releases that are backed up by a brilliant group of support and solution engineers who know this product like the back of their hand.

Ultimately, our validation grows alongside the usage of the product. Engineering teams can be confident when they consume 2.28 and subsequent releases that those releases will work with their specific configurations and use cases. This frees engineers to focus on other tasks and feel confident that the platform can deal with everyone’s favorite “growth and scale” problem.

Enhancements

Reduce Operational Risk by Automating Policies on Infrastructure Changes with Terraformer Enhancements

We heard from several of our Terraformer users that unintended or noncompliant changes to infrastructure hit them where it hurts: the DORA metrics. So we brought a solution that allows you to capture Terraform JSON from a `planfile` and act on it in subsequent stages of your pipeline with an ‘Evaluate Variables’ stage. This allows the pipeline to automatically enforce infrastructure policies and test for quality with every infrastructure change so you reduce any operational risk and increase stability. We also added remote backend support for Terraform Enterprise and Terraform Cloud.

Check out the Terraformer documentation for details on these new capabilities.

Speed Up Your Time-to-Market and Accelerate your Velocity with Parallel Pipelines

The second feature we want to highlight is a clever optimization that was driven by one of our customers unique scale use cases, called Max Concurrent Pipeline Executions. This was an open source Spinnaker contribution that makes Armory CD Self-Hosted even better!

As we worked with our customers pushing the limits of deployments at scale, we saw scenarios where enabling concurrent pipeline executions would cause performance degradations and timeouts, but disabling concurrency was not fast enough for the deployment frequency goals of the team.

Max Concurrent Pipeline Executions allows you to throttle the number of maximum parallel pipeline executions, so you can dial in your pipeline to maximize deployment frequency without encountering any performance degradations or timeouts. This effectively allows you to continue accelerating your deployment frequency and velocity and speed up your time-to-market with exciting new features and products.

You can find the Max Concurrent Pipeline Executions feature in the your pipeline’s **Configuration**  section. It is disabled by default.

What’s next?

1. Check out the Armory CD Self-Hosted release notes for all the changes
2. Talk to us about making the world better with software in the Spinnaker Slack! We’re over in #armory
3. We are so excited about the open source contributions for AWS Launch Templates that we plan to tell that story in a dedicated future post! Stay tuned.

Thank you for changing the world with cool software. It’s time to build!

See you out there,

Randall Abele, Group Product Manager