How Spinnaker and Armory are enabling Informatica’s multicloud strategy
Informatica’s Results
+2500% deployment velocity
Allow product teams to self-service
Enable canary deployments and one-click rollbacks
Informatica’s Evolution into the (Multi)Cloud
Over the last several years, Informatica has invested heavily in transitioning to a microservices-based architecture and moving workloads out of the data center and into the cloud. A multicloud strategy was a part of their vision from the beginning; Informatica began with AWS, then added Azure, and will be deploying to GCP in the coming quarters.
One Tool to Rule them All
Prior to Informatica’s cloud transition, code was deployed using a mix of Chef and other tools, with processes and tooling varying across teams. That process becomes very difficult to scale effectively and consistently in a multicloud environment. As a result, Informatica’s Global Cloud Operations group sought a single, centralized tool that would enable continuous delivery across all on-premises and cloud environments, using a standard process. Furthermore, they wanted a continuous delivery platform that would:
- Dramatically increase their deployment velocity
- Allow product teams to self-service and self-configure
- Enable sophisticated deployment strategies such as canary deployments and one-click rollbacks
“We wanted an open source tool that we could control, backed by experts that could help us manage it.“
Enter Spinnaker & Armory
After evaluating a number of tools including Chef and Jenkins X, Spinnaker emerged as the only platform that could address these needs, and do so at Informatica’s massive scale. Spinnaker’s position as a fast-growing open source platform was also highly appealing, providing Informatica with the support of a large and committed community while avoiding the risk of vendor lock-in after committing to a centralized tool. “We wanted an open source tool that we could control, backed by experts that could help us manage it,” said Vijay Chodavarapu, Informatica’s VP of Global Cloud Operations & SRE.
Informatica partnered with Armory, the Spinnaker experts, to help implement and evangelize Spinnaker throughout the organization. “I believe in investing in relationships, not just in tools. Armory has been a part of our extended team—we don’t even feel as though they are outside of our organization.”
“Some tools solve 70%, 80%, maybe even 90% of the problem, but the really tough part is always in the last 10–20%. And when we faced those challenges, particularly in getting Spinnaker up and running for Azure, the Armory team quickly jumped in to push new updates and deploy fixes.”
“Today, the only way that enterprises can compete is if they can deliver at the same velocity as startups, while doing so with much greater scale and reliability. We’ve already increased our deployment velocity 4-5x, and by next year we plan to be deploying 20-25x faster than we were before Spinnaker.”
Vijay Chodavarapu, VP Global Cloud Operations & SRE, Informatica
Rolling Spinnaker Out
Informatica’s Global Cloud Operations team got Spinnaker up and running, and has been successfully onboarding different product teams. Many existing applications have been moved onto Spinnaker, and new applications start deploying with Spinnaker from the get-go.
“The question from product teams at Informatica is no longer ‘Why Spinnaker,’ it is ‘How do I get my team on Spinnaker?“
Armory Scales Spinnaker for the Enterprise
Armory helps teams ship better software, faster. Our platform is powered by Spinnaker, the de facto standard in cloud-native continuous software delivery developed and open sourced by Netflix and Google. Armory brings the power of Spinnaker to your business, coupled with enterprise-grade availability, powerful feature extensions, and 24×7 expert support and services.
Commit. Deploy. Repeat.
Focus on writing great code, not deploying it!