 Welcome back to theCUBE conversation here. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE in Palo Alto, California. We've got two great guests here featuring Armory who has with them Patreon open source and talking open source and the enterprise. I'm your host, John Furrier with theCUBE. Thanks for watching guys. Thanks for coming on. Really appreciate it. We've got two great guests. Ben Mappen, SVP, strategic partner at Armory and Ian Delahorn, staff SRE at Patreon. Gentlemen, you know, open source and enterprises here and we want to talk about it. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. Yeah. Thank you, John. Really happy to be here. Thank you to theCUBE and your whole crew. I'll start with a quick intro. My name is Ben Mappen, one of Armory's founders lead strategic partnerships, as John mentioned. You know, it really starts with a premise that traditional businesses such as hotels, banks, car manufacturers are now acting and behaving much more like software companies than they did in the past. And so if you believe that that's true, what does it mean? It means that these businesses need to get great at delivering their software and specifically to the cloud like AWS. And that's exactly what Armory aims to do for our customers. We're based on open source Spinnaker, which is a continuous delivery platform. And I'm very happy that Ian from Patreon is here to talk about our journey together. Ian, introduce yourself, what you do at Patreon, what Patreon does and then why are you guys together here, what's the story? Absolutely. Hi, John and Ben, thanks for having me. So I am Ian, I am a site reliability engineer at Patreon. And Patreon is a membership platform for creators. And what our mission is to get creators paid, changing the way the art is valued so that creators can make money by having a membership relationship with fans. And we're built on top of AWS and we are using Spinnaker with Armory to deploy our applications that help creators get paid, basically. Talk about the original story, Ben. How you guys together, what brought you together? Obviously Patreon is well known in the creator circles. Congratulations by the way of your success. You've done a great service for the industry and have changed the game. You were doing creators before it was fashionable. And also you got some cutting edge decentralization business models as well. So again, we'll come back to that in a minute. But Ben, talk about how this all comes together. Yeah, yeah. So Ian's got a great kind of origin story on our relationship together. I'll give him a lead in, which is what we've learned over the years from our large customers is that in order to get great at deploying software, it really comes down to three things or at least three things. The first being velocity. You have to ship your software with velocity. So if you're deploying your software once a quarter or even once a year, that does no good to your customers or to your business. Like just code sitting in a feature branch on a shelf more or less, not creating any business value. So you have to ship with speed. Second, you have to ship with reliability. So invariably, there will be bugs. There will be some outages, but one of the things that Armory provides with Spinnaker open sources, the ability to create hardened deployment pipelines so that you're testing the right things at the right times with the right folks involved to do reviews. And if there is, hopefully not, but if there is a problem in production, you're isolating that problem to a small group of users. And then we call this a progressive deployment or a canary deployment where you're deploying to a small number of users. You measure the results, make sure it's good, expand it and expand it. And so I think preventing outages is incredibly important. And then the last thing is being able to deploy multi-target, multi-cloud. And so in the AWS ecosystem, we're talking about EC2, ECS, EKS, Lambda. And so I think that these pieces of value are kind of the pain points that enterprises face can resonate with a lot of companies out there including E&N and PageGround. So I'll let you tell the story. Got it, Ian, go ahead. Absolutely, thanks for the intro, Ben. So background of our partnership with Armory is back in February of 2019, we had a payments slowdown for payments processing and we were risking not getting creators paid in time, which is not great for creators because they rely on us for income to be able to pay themselves, pay their rent and mortgage, but also pay staff because they have video editors, website admins, people of that nature work with them. And there are very many root causes to this incident, all kind of culminated at once. One of the things that we saw was that deploying fixes to remediate this took too long. We're taking at least 45 minutes to deploy a new version of the application. And so we've had continuous delivery before using a custom home-built rolling deploy. We needed to get that time down. We also needed to be secure in our knowledge of like that deploy was stable. So we had to place a break in the middle due to various factors that can happen during a deploy. Previously, I had used Spinnaker at previous employers. I had been set it up myself and introduced it. And I knew about it. I knew like, this is something we could utilize. This would be great, but the Patreon team, the Patreon SRE team at the time was two people. So I don't have the ability to manage Spinnaker on my own. It's a complex open source product. It can do a lot of things. There's a lot of knobs to tweak, a lot of various settings and stuff you need to know about. Tendentially, one of the co-founders of Armory had hit me up earlier. It's like, hey, have you heard of Armory? We're doing this thing, open source Spinnaker. We're packaging this and managing it. Check us out if you want. I kind of like filed away like, okay, well that might be something we can use later. And then like two weeks later, I was like, oh, wait this company that does Spinnaker. I know of them. We should probably have a conversation with them and engage with them. And so you hit them up and said, hey, too many knobs and buttons to push. What's the deal? Yeah, exactly. So I was like, hey, so by the way about that thing, how soon can you get someone over here? So Ben, take us through the progression because that really is how things work in the open source. Open source is really one of those things where a lot of community outreach, a lot of people are, you're really a one degree or two separation from someone who either wrote the project or is involved in the project. Here's a great example. He saw the need for Spinnaker. The business model was there for him to solve. Okay, fixes, rolling deployments, homegrown, all the things, pick your use case. But he wanted to make it easier. This tends to, this is kind of a pattern. What did you guys do? What's the next step? How did this go from here? Yeah, you know, Spinnaker being open source is critical to Armory's success. Many companies, not just Patreon, open source software I think is not really debatable anymore in terms of being applicable to enterprise companies. But the thing with selling open source software to large companies is that they need a backstop. They need not just enterprise support, but they need features and functionality that enable them to use that software at scale and safely. And so those are really the things that we focus on. And we use open source as a, really it's a great community to collaborate and to contribute fixes that other companies can use, other companies contribute fixes and functionality that we then use. But it's really a great place to get feedback and to find new customers that perhaps need that enhanced level of functionality and support. And I'm very, very happy that Patreon was one of those companies. Okay, so let's talk about the Patreon. Okay, obviously scaling is a big part of it. You're an SRE, Site Reliable Engineers with folks who don't know what that is. Your job is essentially managing scale. Some say you're the DevOps manager, but that's not really the right answer. What is the SRE role at Patreon? Share with folks out there who are either, have an SRE, they don't even know it yet or need to have SREs because this is a huge transition and new and emerging must have role in companies. Right, yeah, the SRE at Patreon covers a lot and cover a wide swath of things that we work with and areas that we consider to be our peer view. Not only are we working with our AWS environment, but we also are involved in how can we make the site more reliable or performant so that creators and fans have a good experience. So we work with our content delivery numbers for caching strategies, for caching assets. We work inside the application itself for doing performance. Performance enhancement is also improving observability with distributed tracing and metrics and a lot of that stuff, but also on the build and deploy side, if we can get that deploy time faster, give engineers faster feedback on features that they're working on or bug fixes and also being secure and knowing that the code they're working on gets delivered reliably. Yeah, I think I see I have to continue this delivery as always the killer workflow. I got to ask you guys both the Spinnaker question here. Well, how does Spinnaker being an open source project help you guys? I mean, obviously open source code is great. How has that been significant and beneficial for both Armory and Patreon? Yeah, I'll take the first stab at this one and it starts at the beginning. Spinnaker was created by Netflix and since Netflix open sourced it four or five years ago, there have been countless and significant contributions from many other companies, including Armory, including AWS. And those contributions collectively push the industry forward and allow the companies that use open source Spinnaker or Armory, they can now benefit from all of the collective effort together. So just that community aspect working together is huge, absolutely huge. And open source, I guess on the go-to-market side is a big driver for us. There's many, many companies using open source Spinnaker in production that are not our customers yet. And we survey them. We want to know how they're using open source Spinnaker so that we can then improve open source Spinnaker but also build features that are critical for large companies to run at scale, deploy at scale, deploy with velocity and with reliability. What's your take on the benefits of Spinnaker being open source? A lot of what Ben, it's been really beneficial to be able to like be able to go in and look at the source code for components. Everyone wondering something like, why is this thing working like this or how did they solve this? It's also been useful for I can go ask the community for advice on things. If Armory doesn't have the time or bandwidth to work on some things, I've been able to ask the special interest groups in the open source community, like can we help improve this or something like that? And I've also been able to commit simple bug fixes for features that I've needed as like, well, I don't need to go engage Armory on this. I can just like, I can just write up a simple patch and have that out for review. You know, that's the beautiful thing about open sources, you get the source code. And that's, and some people just think it's so easy, Ben, you know, just, hey, I just give me the open source, I'll code it, I got an unlimited resource team, not, not always the case. So I got to ask you guys on Patreon, why use a company like Armory if you have the open source code? And Armory, why did you build the business on the open source project like Spinnaker? Yeah, like I see, absolutely. Yeah, like I said earlier, the Patreon, the Patreon SRE team was, wasn't is fairly small. There's two people now, we're six people, our studio down, we're six people now. So being, sure we could run Spinnaker on our own if we wanted to, but then we'd have no time to do anything else basically. And that's not the best use of our creators money or fans, the fans paying the creators money since we obviously take a percentage on top of that. And we need to spend that money well. And having Armory who's dedicated to the Spinnaker is dedicated, involved the open source project, but also they're experts on this and they was something that would take me like a week of stumbling around trying to find documentation on how to set this thing up. They've done this like 15, 20 times and they can just go, oh yeah, this is what we do for this and let me go fix it for you. It's like sports, you know, that's your score, you know, you got a teammate. I think that's where you're getting at. I got to ask you, what other things does that free you up? Because this is the classic business model of life. You know, you have a partner, you're moving fast, it slows you down to get into it. Sure you can do it yourself, but why it's faster to go together with a partner and a wingman as we will. What things does that free you up to work on as an SRE? Oh, that's freed me up to work on bigger parts of our build and deploy pipeline. It's freed me up to work on moving from EC2-based deploys onto containerization strategy. It's freed me up to work on more broader observability issues instead of just being laser focused on running and operating Spinnaker. Yeah, and that really kind of highlights, I'm glad you said that, because that highlights what's going on. You had a lot of speed and velocity, you got scale, you got security, and you got new challenges. You got to fix and move fast, it's a whole new world. So again, this is why I love cloud native, right? So you got open source, you got scale, and you guys, it's applying directly to the infrastructure of the business. So Ben, I got to ask you, Armory co-founder, why did you guys build your business on an open source project like Spinnaker? What was the mindset? How did you attack this? What did you guys do? Take us through that piece, because this is truly a great entrepreneurial story about open source. Yeah, yeah, I'll give you the abridged version, which is that my co-founders and I, we solved the same problem, which is CD at a previous company, but we did it kind of the old fashioned way. We hand-rolled it ourselves, we built it on top of Jenkins, and it was great for that company. But, and that was kind of the inspiration for us to then ask questions, hey, is this bigger? We went, at the time, we found that Spinnaker had just been, you know, dog fooded inside of Netflix, and they were open sourcing it. And we thought it was a great opportunity for us to partner. But the bigger reason is that Spinnaker is a platform that deploys to other platforms like AWS and Kubernetes. And the sheer amount of surface area that's required to build a great product is enormous. And I actually believe that the only way to be successful in this space is to be open source, to have a community of large companies and passionate developers that contribute the roads, if you will, to deploy into various targets. And so that's reason number one for it being open source and us wanting to build our business on top of open source. And then the second reason is because we focus almost exclusively on solving enterprise scale problems, we have a platform that needs to be extensible and open source is by definition extensible. So our customers, I mean, Ian just had a great example, right? Like he needed to fix something, he was able to do so, solve it in open source and then, you know, shortly thereafter that fix in mainline gets into the Armory official build and then he can consume his fix. So we see a lot of that from our other customers. And then even, you know, take a very, very large company, they may have custom auth that they need to integrate with like that doesn't, that's not in open source but they can go and build that themselves. Yeah, it really is the new modern way to develop. And I, you know, last 80 years start up showcase last season, Emily Freeman gave a talk on, you know, retiring, I call killing the software, SDLC, the life cycle of how software was developed in the past. And I got to ask you guys and this CUBE conversation is that this is kind of like the kind of the big waiver on now is cloud scale, open source, cloud native, data, security, all being built in the pipelines to your point as SREs enabling a new infrastructure and a new environment for people to build essentially SaaS. So I got to ask you guys as, and you mentioned it Ben, the old way you hand rolled something, Netflix, open source, something, you got to look at Lyft with Envoy. I mean, large scale companies are donating their stuff into open source and people are getting on top of it and building it. So the world's changed. So I got to ask you, what's the difference between standing up a SaaS application today versus say five to eight years ago, because we all see salesforce.com, you know, they built their own data center. Cloud scales change the dynamics of how software is being built and with open source accelerating every quarter you're seeing more growth in software. How has building a platform for applications changed? And how has that changed how people build SaaS applications? Ben, what's your take on this? It's kind of a thought exercise here. Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't even call it a thought exercise. We're seeing it firsthand from our customers. And then I'll give my answer, Ian, you can weigh in on like practical, like what you're actually doing at Patreon with SaaS, but the cost and the kind of entry fee, if you will, for building a SaaS application has tremendously dropped. You don't need to buy servers and put them inside data centers anymore. You just spin up a VM or a Kubernetes cluster with AWS. AWS has led the way in public cloud to make this incredibly easy. And the tool sets being built around cloud native like Armory and like many other companies in the space are making it even easier. So we're just seeing the proliferation of software being developed and hopefully, you know, Armory is playing a role in making it easier and better. So before we get to Ian for a second, I just wanted to just double down on this. This is a great conversation. That implies that there's going to be a new migration of apps everywhere, right? A tsunami of clutter. Good or bad, is that good or bad? Or is it all open source? Is it all good, Ben? Absolutely good. For sure there will be, you know, good stuff developed and not so good stuff developed, but survival of the fittest will hopefully promote those, the best apps with the highest value to the end user and society at large and push us all forward. Ian, what's your take? Obviously, Kubernetes, you're seeing things like observability, talking about how we're managing stateful and services that are being deployed and tear down in real time, automated. All new things are developing. How does building a true scalable SaaS application change today versus say five, eight years ago? I mean, like you said, there's a lot, there's a lot new, both open source and SaaS products available that you can use to build a scale, stuff like if you're going to need to build like secure authentication, instead of having to roll that out, you could go with something like octa or a zero, you can just like pull that off the shelf, stuff for like managing push notifications before that was like something really hard to do. Then Firebase came on the scene and also for managing state and applications, stuff like that. And also for like being able to deliver code before you had Jenkins, maybe even for that, you don't really have anything. Jenkins came along and then now you have open source projects like Spinnaker that you can use to deliver and then you have companies built around that that you can just go and say, hey, can you please help us deliver this? Like you just help us enable us to be able to build our products so that we can focus on delivering value to our creators and fans instead of having to focus on other things. So it builds faster, you can compose stuff faster, you don't have to roll your own code, you can just roll your own modules basically and then proprietary on top of it. Absolutely. Yeah, and that's why commercial open source is booming. Guys, thank you so much, Ben. Congratulations on Armory. Ian, great to have you on from Patreon, well-known successful company, congratulations. We don't know Patreon, check it out. They have changed the game on creators and leading the industry. Ben, great job with Armory and Spinnaker. Thanks for coming on. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Okay, I'm John Furrier here with theCUBE Conversation in Palo Alto. Thanks for watching.