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Armory Extends Scope of Spinnaker CD Distribution

Armory today updated both the self-hosted and managed editions of its distribution of the open source Spinnaker continuous delivery (CD) platform. The updates support concurrent pipelines and provide tighter integration with open source Terraform infrastructure-as-code (IaC) to better enforce policies.

Previously, the two platforms were known as Armory Enterprise and Armory Enterprise Managed. They are now being rechristened; Armory Continuous Deployment Self-Hosted becomes Armory Continuous Deployment Managed in part to provide more differentiation from a CD cloud service the company rolled out last month that is not based on Spinnaker.

Adam Frank, vice president of product for Armory, said other capabilities added to the platform include additional testing tools for contributions to the Spinnaker platform as well as enhanced plug-ins and remediation capabilities for Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) that might impact the Spinnaker platform.

Despite launching a declarative CD-as-a-service platform that is not based on Spinnaker, Armory remains committed to supporting organizations that prefer to continue to rely on the open source platform, said Frank.

The number of organizations that routinely make use of a dedicated CD platform is still relatively small. While organizations have been employing continuous integration (CI) within a CI/CD platform, making use of the CD element of those platforms has proven challenging. Each platform used to run applications has been unique, so automating delivery has been problematic. CI platforms, in some cases, have been extended using custom scripts to automate application delivery, but those efforts don’t typically scale across an extended enterprise. Many organizations that attempted to extend the open source Jenkins CI/CD platform, for example, are now looking to more loosely couple CI and CD processes to make DevOps workflows less brittle, noted Frank.

Armory is making a case for a distinct CD platform at a time when more organizations are starting to build microservices-based applications on Kubernetes clusters that expose a standard set of application programming interfaces (APIs) regardless of what infrastructure they are deployed on. In many cases, those organizations now need to manage multiple pipelines in parallel as application environments become more complex rather than relying on a single pipeline, noted Frank.

There’s no doubt that as the pace of application development continues to accelerate, the need to automate CD will become a more pressing issue. DevOps teams are releasing a larger number of smaller updates to applications and there’s also a need to be able to easily roll back those updates in case an unexpected issue is encountered, said Frank.

It’s not clear yet how many organizations will be adopting dedicated CD platforms, but as application development continues to evolve many DevOps teams will, at the very least, be revisiting their existing processes. At the same time, there are also many organizations that are just beginning their DevOps journey. Most of those organizations are not committed to one CI/CD approach versus another.

Regardless of approach, however, the expectation in the era of digital business transformation is organizations will be able to deliver software updates in a timely manner. The only way to achieve that goal, however, will be to have some type of CD capability that reliably operates at the scale required by organizations that need to operate like a true software company.

Mike Vizard

Mike Vizard is a seasoned IT journalist with over 25 years of experience. He also contributed to IT Business Edge, Channel Insider, Baseline and a variety of other IT titles. Previously, Vizard was the editorial director for Ziff-Davis Enterprise as well as Editor-in-Chief for CRN and InfoWorld.

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