{"id":6972,"date":"2022-01-26T20:45:30","date_gmt":"2022-01-26T20:45:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mailinvest.blog\/index.php\/2022\/01\/26\/patreon-achieves-enterprise-scale-devops-mastery-with-armory-spinnaker\/"},"modified":"2022-01-26T20:45:30","modified_gmt":"2022-01-26T20:45:30","slug":"patreon-achieves-enterprise-scale-devops-mastery-with-armory-spinnaker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mailinvest.blog\/index.php\/2022\/01\/26\/patreon-achieves-enterprise-scale-devops-mastery-with-armory-spinnaker\/","title":{"rendered":"Patreon achieves enterprise scale DevOps mastery with Armory + Spinnaker"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Adopting DevOps methodology is more than hype. In today\u2019s ever-changing business environments, the ability to react fast and scale is essential.<\/p>\n

Thirty-two percent of customers will walk away from a brand they love after only one bad experience, according to a Pricewaterhouse Coopers LLC customer experience survey<\/a>.\u00a0On the opposite side of the scale, companies saw a 30 to 50% increase in operational efficiency, a 20 to 30% rise in employee engagement, and a 10 to 30% boost in customer satisfaction after transforming their development pipelines, according to<\/a> management consulting firm McKinsey & Company Inc.<\/p>\n

Organizations with in-house information technology teams have traditionally built out their own deployment capabilities. But custom solutions aren\u2019t built to deal with the complexity of modern dispersed environments, according to\u00a0Ian Delahorne<\/a> (pictured, right), staff site reliability engineer at Patreon Inc.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was very hard for us, with our custom-built deploy tooling, to be able to easily deploy fast and to roll back if things went wrong,\u201d said Ian Delahorne<\/a> (pictured, right), staff site reliability engineer at Patreon Inc.<\/p>\n

Delahorne and Andrew Backes<\/a> (pictured, left), head of engineering at Armory Inc., spoke with Lisa Martin<\/a>, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media\u2019s livestreaming studio, during the AWS Startup Showcase: Open Cloud Innovations<\/a> event. They discussed enterprise-scale CI\/CD pipeline deployment and how Patreon streamlined Spinnaker deployment<\/a> with help from Armory. (* Disclosure below.)<\/em><\/p>\n

Custom-built tooling can\u2019t handle enterprise-scale deployment<\/h3>\n

The trouble began when Patreon had an outage that slowed down its payment processing systems. More than an operational oops, this was a mission-critical issue. Patreon facilitates funding for artists and creators, and over 200,000 rely on the platform<\/a> for income.<\/p>\n

\u201cPatreon 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,\u201d Delahorne said, describing how Patreon helps creators earn a living by being connected straight to their audience.<\/p>\n

Delahorne knew that open-source cloud-native continuous delivery tool Spinnaker<\/a> could solve the issue, but he was one of just two site reliability engineers on staff. \u201cSpinnaker is a very complex product. I didn\u2019t have the engineering bandwidth to be able to set up, deploy, manage it,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

With fortuitous timing, Armory\u2019s marketing department had contacted Delahorne just the week before the outage. And the company\u2019s promise to \u201cmake software delivery, continuous, collaborative, scalable and safe\u201d was fresh in his mind.<\/p>\n

The solution matched Patreon\u2019s need, and a partnership was born.<\/p>\n

How Armory adds value on top of Spinnaker<\/h3>\n

Alongside providing a platform for safe, speedy deployment, Armory provides Patreon with a policy engine<\/a> module that restricts who can deploy where for compliance issues. Patreon also uses Armory\u2019s pipelines as code<\/a> module for being able to build reusable deploy pipelines so that software engineers can easily integrate Spinnaker without having to know a lot about the tool, according to Delahorne.<\/p>\n

\u201cTake this pipeline module and add your variables into it, and you\u2019ll be off to the races deploying,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

One of the big areas Armory focuses on how it can provide building blocks on top of open-source Spinnaker \u201cthat sites can use to tailor the solution to their needs,\u201d Backes stated.<\/p>\n

Even more added value comes from Armory\u2019s managed products, according to Delahorne. \u201cThey have a team that\u2019s managing our Spinnaker installation, helping us with upgrades, helping us with the issues. All that stuff that unlocks us to be able to focus on building up our creators,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Before Patreon partnered with Armory, regular deploys would take somewhere around 45 minutes each. And events that required more instances, such as the first-of-month payment processing, would take even longer. The company cut that timeframe down to 16 to 20 minutes per deploy, even when deploying to a few hundred hosts.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat helps us bring features to creators and fans a lot faster,\u201d Delahorne said. Plus, he rests easier knowing that \u201cwe have a secure way to roll back if needed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Enterprise-scale explained<\/h3>\n

\u201cEnterprise scale\u201d is a term that is rarely comprehensively defined. Often when companies think enterprise-scale, they only think about the volume of infrastructure or the volume of software that\u2019s running at any given time, according to Backes. But there\u2019s more to it than how many EC2 instances or containers a company is running.<\/p>\n

The velocity of deployment, as in how much time it takes to get features out to customers, is another factor, as are stability and reliability and site-specific technologies that need integrating with a company\u2019s existing deployment tooling. And there\u2019s also the added complication of multiple target deployment.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt isn\u2019t always just EC2 \u2026 it\u2019s going to be ECS, Lambda. All of these workloads are out there running,\u201d Backes stated. \u201cThe amount of multiple targets that are being deployed to at any given moment just keep increasing.\u201d<\/p>\n

These are all concerns around enterprise scale that companies need to address, according to Backes.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo one of the key things we\u2019re doing is building ahead of that, making sure that our features are enabling users to hit deployment scales they\u2019ve never seen or imagined before,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE\u2019s and theCUBE\u2019s coverage of the <\/span>AWS Startup Showcase: Open Cloud Innovations<\/span><\/a> event.<\/span> (* Disclosure: Armory Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Armory nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n