Show HN: Simple cloud deployments with CD as-a-Service

109 points by techcofounder 3 years ago | 29 comments

Hey folks, I'm Ben from Armory.io (YC W17). We just launched Continuous Deployment-as-a-Service (CDaaS) to make it easy for developers to deploy their apps safely to the cloud. We’d greatly appreciate (raw, candid) feedback from the HN community if this solution improves the speed at which you deploy to production. We have a free-forever tier that gives you up to 25 Application Targets[1] (our unit of scale for pricing).

Try it here: https://www.armory.io/products/continuous-deployment-as-a-se...

Our Story

We’ve been helping large companies with CD since 2016 by selling them our distribution of Spinnaker (spinnaker.io, originally Netflix OSS). We’ve learned three big lessons:

One reason developers are drawn to Spinnaker is because it provides an imperative approach to orchestrating deployment workflows Operating Spinnaker “on-prem” (usually in the customer’s AWS account) requires significant effort Doing true continuous deployment to production requires the use of advanced strategies to mitigate risk

These learnings inspired us to build CDaaS and make it easy for developers to employ well-understood deployment strategies like blue/green and canary deployments without having to write custom code. With CDaaS, our aim is to deliver many of the features developers rely on from Spinnaker, but in a declarative manner that supports the GitOps approach they know and use extensively.

CDaaS currently supports deployments to Kubernetes but we’re adding additional cloud providers quickly (AWS, GCP, Azure, etc)

How It Works

Connect any number of Kubernetes clusters to our central control plane by installing a lightweight network agent. Once connected, you can configure your application deployment logic in a declarative YAML file that can be checked in alongside your app’s source code. Deployments can be invoked from our CLI which allow you to use your existing CI platform (Jenkins, Github Actions, CircleCI, etc) to trigger a deployment. Monitor deployments (and take additional action like rolling back, if needed) from our UI.

More Information

CD-as-a-Service product docs: https://docs.armory.io/cd-as-a-service/

Short Demo (8 min): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r29UCKMXEi4

alexbello 3 years ago |

Great to see Armory team manifest their deep expertise in software deployments through a simple SaaS offering that reduces a lot of complexity and adds value to the existing SDLC workflows instead of trying to replace them. Excited to see future multi-cloud and functions support, which will be game changing as most companies nowadays are multi-cloud and deploy more than just containers.

junot 3 years ago |

This could be cool. I've worked at places in the past that have essentially tried to roll their own tool like this, which I think was pretty resource-intensive. I never worked on those directly, so I don't know if this would fully meet the requirements those tools did.

parth4992 3 years ago | |

Agreed, I believe the intention is to provide a tool that works, scales and does not need maintenance like homegrown tooling does.

stephenspalding 3 years ago |

Looks pretty sweet! Love the declarative model. Imperative pipelines are super flexible but also a pain to maintain and easy to get wrong. The key features like canary and blue/green all that most deployments actually need.

LinuxDude007 3 years ago |

Great demo, very simple interface and great features!

techcofounder 3 years ago | |

Thanks LinuxDude007! Curious what features you especially liked?

scootrous 3 years ago |

Awesome - going to try this next week. I haven't been able to get Spinnaker deployed internally but this could get us over the hump

louhong 3 years ago |

Very cool to see this. Much needed and I like what the Armory crew has done in the past. Will def be keeping my eyes on this.

lfpeb8b45ez 3 years ago |

If only this was Compact Discs as a Service…

bnotwen 3 years ago |

I was able to get it setup and deploying to my k8s cluster quickly. Can't wait to try it with one of my own services.

hudsonhacker 3 years ago |

Good demo video. There's still plenty of room for innovation in the CD space!

techcofounder 3 years ago | |

Indeed. Our goal is to make it as easy as possible for developers to enable CD. It's still super early in this space, as shown by the fact that most companies have homegrown tooling (usually some scripts on top of Jenkins). It shouldn't be that way. When you think about other categories within DevOps (observability, security, alerting) there are many out-of-the-box tools to choose from such that one would never say "I think I'll build an observability tool from scratch here".

fablava 3 years ago |

Definitely worth checking out - game changer for the industry!

catimm 3 years ago |

Love how this is coming together! Great job Armory Crew!

s1nner 3 years ago |

This is HUGE! We've been asking for this for years.

vijithreddy 3 years ago |

Looks intuitive. Would definitely like to test this.

dragonguardian 3 years ago |

very quick setup and deploying already, fascinating. will keep an eye on it to see what new things will be added over time.

parth4992 3 years ago | |

are there specific challenges in your process that you'd want to see addressed?

saradh7 3 years ago |

Looks great, would like to test it.

kkotula 3 years ago |

Cant wait to test it myself

techcofounder 3 years ago | |

How are you doing your deployments today? And, any other targets other than K8s?

falconwizard 3 years ago |

This is sick!!!

techcofounder 3 years ago | |

Thanks, falconwizard. What do you like about it?

ribeyesteak 3 years ago |

looking forward to playing with this!

ChristineZhao 3 years ago |

Great demo.

Youth9797 3 years ago |

This slays

bealesh 3 years ago |

game changer!

techcofounder 3 years ago | |

Kind words, bealesh. Could you elaborate on what you liked?

bealesh 3 years ago | | |

I've implemented CI/CD at multiple companies on many platforms, including Argo and Spinnaker - specifically at startups with limited resources, managing a bunch of microservices or an application specifically for CD is usually just not an option. I love that it's modular and doesn't require any specific CI tool, and the simplicity of implementing canary without a service mesh or custom tooling is nothing short of amazing.