Armory this week committed to advancing adoption of the open source Spinnaker continuous delivery (CD) platform in enterprise IT environments after revealing it has raised an additional $28 million in funding.
Company CEO Daniel Odio said Armory will add proprietary tools to a curated distribution of Spinnaker that will make it easier for the average IT organization to deploy and manage Spinnaker. Developed by Netflix, Spinnaker is gaining traction as a CD platform in the wake of becoming one of the four projects being managed under the auspices of the Cloud Delivery Foundation (CDF), an arm of the Linux Foundation.
Spinnaker is designed to be a CD platform that includes all the management tools required to manage that process. While continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) platforms such as Jenkins have addressed aspects of CD, most of the daily usage of those platforms has been squarely focused on continuous integration. As part of an effort to meld CI/CD platforms and Spinnaker, the CDF has accepted both Spinnaker and Jenkins as part of the first four projects that will be developed under its auspices. The other two are Jenkins X, a CI/CD platform specifically designed for building microservices-based applications on top of Kubernetes, and Tekton, a set of pipelines also designed specifically for Kubernetes.
Odio said there are already more than 500 organizations using Spinnaker, and each one is not standardized on a specific CI/CD platform. Armory is part of the CDF but also sees a need for a curated instance of Spinnaker that is optimized to meet the needs of enterprise IT environments, he said.
In general, Odio said a “flywheel effect” manifests once an organization launches roughly its eighth project using Spinnaker. From that point on, adoption of Spinnaker starts to accelerate to the point where an organization sees the need to standardize on a single curated instance of Spinnaker, he said.
The bigger issue as far as adoption of Spinnaker and other DevOps tools remains cultural, Odio added. Many organizations still don’t accept the fact that CI/CD platforms are intended to foster a level of accelerated development that makes it more feasible to experiment and innovate. There are, of course, inherent risks to that approach in the sense that many of those projects might fail. Many enterprise IT organizations are still coming to terms with the need to accept higher levels of failure as the price of learning, he noted.
In the meantime, many organizations that have embraced DevOps now find themselves on the cusp of a major transition as the shift toward cloud-native applications increases. Most CI/CD platforms today were designed to accelerate development of monolithic applications. Now what’s needed is a new generation of CI/CD platforms that are designed to accelerate development of microservices-based applications based on containers. As a result, many organizations will end up employing multiple CI/CD platforms. Armory is betting many of them will try to delineate where CI leaves off and CD begins.
