 Welcome to the AWS startup showcase, theCUBE's premier platform and show. This is our second season, episode one of this program. I'm Lisa Martin, your host here with two guests here to talk about open source. Please welcome Andrew Bacchus, the VP of engineering at Armory and one of our alumni, Ian Delahorn, the staff site reliability engineer at Patreon. Guys, it's great to have you on the program. Thank you. Great to be back. We're going to dig into a whole bunch of stuff here in the next fast paced 15 minutes. But Andrew, let's go ahead and start with you. Give the audience an overview of Armory, who you guys are, what you do. I'd love to. So Armory was founded in 2016 with the vision to help companies unlock innovation through software. And what we're focusing on right now is helping those companies make software delivery continuous, collaborative, scalable and safe. Got it. Those are all very important things. Ian, help the audience. If anyone isn't familiar with Patreon, it's a very cool platform. Talk to us a little bit about that again. Absolutely. Patreon is a membership platform for creators to be able to connect with their fans and for fans to be able to subscribe to their favorite creators and help creators get paid and have them earn a living with just being connected straight to their audience. Very cool creators like podcasters, even journalists, video, content creators. There's so many. There's everything from, like you said, journalists, YouTubers, photographers, 3D modelers. We have a nightclub that's on there. We have several theater groups on there. There's a lot of different creators. I keep discovering new ones every day. A nightclub. I got to check that out. Very cool. So, Ian, let's go to you. We talk about enterprise scale. I'm using air quotes here because it's a phrase that we use in every conversation in the tech industry, scalability is key. Talk to us about what enterprise scale actually means from Armory's perspective. Why is it so critical and how do you help enterprises to actually achieve it? Yeah, so a lot of the times when companies think about enterprise scale, they think about the volume of infrastructure, volume of software that's running at any given time. There's also a few more things that go into that, just beyond how many EC2 instances you're running or containers you're running. Also, velocity. How much time does it take you to get features out to your customers and then stability and reliability? Then, of course, in enterprises, it isn't as simple as everyone deploying to the same targets. It isn't always just EC2. A lot of the time it's going to be multiple targets. EC2, it's going to be ECS, Lambda. All of these workloads are out there running and how does a central platform team or a tooling team at a site enable that for users, enable deployment capabilities to those targets? Then, of course, on top of that, there's going to be site-specific technologies and how does your deployment tooling integrate with those site-specific technologies? Is enterprise scale now even more important given the very transformative events we've seen the last two years? We've seen such acceleration, cloud adoption, digital transformation really becoming a necessity for businesses to stay alive. Do you think that that scale now is even more important? Definitely, definitely. We went through a wave of the first set of digital transformations where companies are moving to the cloud and we know that's accelerating quite a bit. So that scale is all moving to the cloud and the amount of multiple targets that are being deployed to at any given moment, they just keep increasing. So that is a concern that companies need to address. Let's talk about the value, but we're going to get into Spinnaker here and the deployment, but also let's start, Andrew, with the value that Armory delivers on top of Spinnaker. What makes this a best-of-breed solution? Yeah, so on top of open-source Spinnaker, there are a lot of other building blocks that you're going to need to deploy at scale. So you're going to need to be able to provide modules or some way of giving your users a reusable building block that is catered to your site. So that is one of the big areas that Armory focuses on is how can we provide building blocks on top of open-source Spinnaker that sites can use to tailor the solution to their needs. Got it, tailor it to their needs. Ian, let's bring you back into the conversation. Now talk to us about the business needs, a compelling event that led Patreon to choose Spinnaker on top of Armory. Absolutely, almost three years ago, we had an outage which resulted in our payment processing slowed down and that's something we definitely don't want to have happen because this would hinder creators' ability to get paid on time for them to be able to pay their employees, pay their rent, all that whole, like everything that everyone depends on them. And there are many factors that went into this outage and one of them we identified is that it was very hard for us to, with our custom built deploy tooling to be able to easily deploy fast and to roll back if things went wrong. So I had used Spinnaker before to previous employer early on and I knew that that would be a tool that we could use to solve our problem. The problem was that the SRE team at Patreon at that time was only two people. So Spinnaker is a very complex product. I didn't have the engineering bandwidth to be able to set up, deploy, manage it on my own. And I had happened to hear it of Armory this week before and was like, this is a company that could probably help me solve my problem. So I engaged early on with Andrew and the team and we migrate our custom deploy to Spinnaker and help stabilize our deploys and speed them up. So you were saying that the deployments were taking way too long before. And of course, as you mentioned from a payment processing perspective, that's people's livelihood. So that's a pretty serious issue there. You found Armory a week into searching. This seems like it was deployed pretty quickly. The week before the incident, they had randomly, the one of the co-founders randomly reached out to me and was like, we're doing this thing with Armory. You might be interested in this or doing this thing with Spinnaker, we're called Armory. And I kind of filed it away and then they came fortuitous that we were able to use them, like just reach out to them like a week later. That is fortuitous, my goodness. What a good outreach and good timing there on Armory's part. Ian, sneak with you a little bit. Talk to us about what it is that the business challenges that Armory helps you to resolve. What is it about it that just makes you know this is the exact right solution for us? Obviously you talked about not going direct with Spinnaker as a very lean IT team, but what are some of the key business needs that it's solving? Yeah, there's several, several business needs that we've been able to leverage Armory for. One of them, as I mentioned, they having a deployment platform that we know will give us stable deploys has been very important. There's been, they have a policy engine module that we use for making sure that certain environments can only be deployed to by certain individuals for compliance issues. We definitely, we use their Pipelines as code module for being able to use to build reusable deploy pipeline so that software engineers can easily integrate Spinnaker into their builds without having to know a lot about Spinnaker. They're like, here take this pipeline module and add your variables into it and you'll be off to the races deploying. So those are some of the value as that Armory has been able to add on top of Spinnaker. On top of that, we use their managed products. So they have a team that's managing our Spinnaker installation helping us with upgrades, helping out with issues, all that stuff that unlocks us to be able to focus on delivering about your creators instead of focusing on operating Spinnaker. Andrea, back to you, talk to me a little bit about as the VP of engineering, the partnership, the relationship that Armory has with Patreon and how symbiotic is it? How much are they helping you to develop the product that Armory is delivering to its customers? Yeah, one of the main things we wanna make sure we do is help Patreon be successful. So there are gonna be some site-specific needs there that we want to make sure that we are in tune with and that we're helping with. But really, we view it as a partnership. So Patreon has worked with us, well, I can't believe it's been three years or a little bit more now, but we have had a lot of feedback sessions, a lot of going back and forth on how we can improve our product to meet the needs of Patreon better. And then of course, the wider market. So one thing that is neat about seeing a smaller team, you know, SRE team that Ian is on is they can depend on us more. They have less bandwidth themselves to invest into their tooling. So that's the opportunity for us to provide those more mature building blocks to them so that they can, you know, combine those in a way that meets their needs and their business needs. And Ian, back to you, talk to me about how has the partnership with Armory, you said it's been almost three years now, how has that helped you do your job better as an SRE? What are some of the advantages of that to that role? Yeah, absolutely. Armory's been a great partner to work with. We've used their expertise in helping to bring new features into the open-source spinnaker, especially when we decided that we wanted to not only deploy to EC2 instances, but we wanted to deploy to elastic container service and lambdas to shift from our normal instance-based deploy as into containerization. There were several, several warts around the existing elastic container service deploy and lambda deploys that we were able to work with Armory and have them champion some changes inside open-source as well as their custom modules to help us be able to shift our deploys to those targets. Got it. Andrew Buckover, do you talk to me? I want to walk through, you talked about from an enterprise scale perspective, some of the absolute critical components there, but I want to talk about what Armory has done to help customers like Patreon to address things like speed to market, customer satisfaction as Ian was talking about, the compelling event was payment processing, a lot of content creators could have been in trouble there. Walk me through how you're actually solving those key challenges that not just Patreon's facing, but enterprises across industries. Yeah, of course. So talking specifically to what brought Ian in was a problem that they needed to fix inside of their system. So when you are rolling out a change like that, you want it to be fast, you want to get that change out very quickly, but you also want to make sure that the deployment system itself is stable and reliable. So the last thing you're going to want is any sort of hiccup with the tool that you're using to fix your product to roll out changes to your customers. So that is a key focus area for us in everything that we do is we make sure that whenever we're building features that are going to expand capabilities, deployment capabilities that we are focusing firstly on stability and reliability of the deployment system itself. So those are a few features, a few focus areas that we continually build into the product. And I'm sure a lot of enterprises know that as soon as you start doing things at massive scale, sometimes the stability and reliability can be jeopardized a little bit or you start hitting against those limits or what are the, what walls do you encounter? So one of the key things we're doing is building ahead of that, making sure that our features are enabling users to hit deployment scales they've never seen or imagined before. So that's a big part of what Armory is. Ian, can you add a number to that in terms of before Armory and the after in terms of that velocity? Absolutely. Before Armory, our deploys would take sometimes somewhere around 45 minutes and we cut that in half if not more down to like the like 16 to 20 minute ranges where we are currently deploying to a few hundred hosts. So, and that the previous deployment strategy would take longer if we scaled up the number of instances for big events like our payment processing to do the first of the month currently. So being able to have that know that our deploys will take about the same amount of time each time it'll be faster that helps us bring features to creators and fans a lot faster. And the stability aspect has also been very important knowing that we have a secure way to roll back if needed, what you didn't have previously. Okay, something goes wrong. That's been extremely useful. And I can mention Ian that velocity is critical because I mean, more and more and more these days there are content creators everywhere in so many different categories that we talked about even nightclubs that to be able to deliver that velocity through a technology like Armory is table stakes for a trans business. Absolutely, yeah. Andrew back over to you. I want to kind of finish out here with in the last couple of years where things have been dynamic. Have you seen any leading industries? I know you guys work with enterprises across organizations and Fortune 500's but have you seen any industries in particular that are really leaning on Armory to help them achieve that velocity that we've been talking about? You know, we have a pretty good spread across the market but since we are focused on cloud to deploy into cloud technologies that's one of the main value props for Armory. So that's going to be enabling deployments to AWS and similar clouds. So the companies that we work with are really ones that have either already gone through that transformation or on their journey. Then of course now Kubernetes is a force. It's kind of taken over. So we're getting pulled into even more companies that are embracing Kubernetes. So I wouldn't say that there's an overall trend but we have customers all across the Fortune 500 all across mid-market to Fortune 500. So there's depending on the complexity of the corporation itself or the enterprise itself we're able to do, you know, I think Ian mentioned our policy engine and a few other features that are really tailored to companies that have restricted environments moving into the cloud. Got it. And that's absolutely critical these days to help organizations pivot multiple times and to get that speed to market. Cause as of course as consumers whether we're on the business side or the commercial side we have an expectation that we're going to be able to get whatever we want ASAP and especially if that's payments processing that's pretty critical. And as thank you for joining me today talking about Armory built on Spinnaker what it's doing for customers like Patreon. We appreciate your time and your insights. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes AWS startup showcase season two, episode one.