In August 2019, startup Armory announced a $28 million Series B funding round aimed at accelerating its enterprise distribution of Spinnaker, the open-source multi-cloud continuous delivery (CD) platform originally created by Netflix. The raise signaled growing enterprise appetite for mature, production-grade CD tooling as organizations scaled their DevOps practices across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
This article is based on reporting originally published by ITPro Today, drawing on an interview with Armory CEO Daniel Odio.
What Is Spinnaker?
Spinnaker is an open-source, multi-cloud continuous delivery platform that Netflix originally developed to manage its large-scale cloud deployments. It has since evolved into a community-governed project with contributors from multiple organizations. Spinnaker supports deploying to a wide range of targets — virtual machines, containers, AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and other public cloud providers — making it appealing for teams that need flexibility across deployment environments.
According to Odio, Spinnaker effectively codifies the deployment best practices developed at Netflix and Google into a reusable platform: “You can think of Spinnaker as codifying kind of the best practices of Netflix and Google in a platform.”
A key strength is its role as an orchestration layer across cloud providers — what Odio described as “the conductor of the cloud orchestra” — handling the provisioning, management, and teardown of cloud infrastructure across different targets from a single control plane.
An Enterprise Distribution of Spinnaker
Armory follows an open-core business model: the foundation of its platform is the open-source Spinnaker project, with proprietary features layered on top for commercial customers. This approach lets Armory contribute to the upstream open-source project while building differentiated capabilities for enterprise use cases.
Odio highlighted two notable enterprise-specific capabilities:
- Air-gap deployment support: Armory can deploy Spinnaker in highly secure, network-isolated (“air gap”) data center environments where servers have no direct connection to external networks — a common requirement in regulated industries such as finance and defense.
- Pipelines as Code (GitOps): Armory introduced a feature that allows teams to define Spinnaker pipeline configurations as code, check those definitions into Git, and then share them as reusable modules across an organization. This GitOps approach ties deployment orchestration directly to version-controlled source code, improving auditability and consistency.
GitOps — the practice of using Git commits and pull requests to drive infrastructure and deployment operations — was an emerging pattern in the DevOps community at the time. Armory’s pipelines-as-code feature positioned Spinnaker as a natural fit for teams already using GitHub or other Git-based workflows.
Why Enterprise Teams Need CD Tooling at Scale
Odio’s core argument was that large enterprises — particularly Global 2000 companies — face a different class of CD challenge than smaller organizations. With thousands of developers, multiple business units, and a mix of on-premises and cloud infrastructure, they need:
- A single, standardized deployment path to production (a “golden path”)
- Centrally enforced compliance and security policies
- The ability to route workloads to the appropriate cloud target automatically
- Visibility across multiple cloud providers in one interface
Spinnaker’s multi-cloud architecture directly addresses these requirements. Developers can define what to deploy without needing to specify the underlying infrastructure details — whether a VM, container, or a particular cloud provider’s native service. Spinnaker handles the target-specific orchestration transparently.
Odio acknowledged that adopting Spinnaker is a significant investment: “Spinnaker is absolutely a big commitment and investment.” To support enterprise onboarding, Armory maintains a professional services and customer success organization that embeds with clients during implementation.
Multi-Cloud and Hybrid Cloud as Primary Use Cases
While Netflix built Spinnaker for aggressive, all-in cloud deployment, most large enterprises in 2019 were still in the early stages of cloud migration. Hybrid cloud — running workloads across both on-premises data centers and public cloud — was a common intermediate state. Spinnaker’s ability to manage deployments across both environments made it a practical tool for enterprises gradually shifting workloads rather than performing a hard cutover.
Odio positioned Spinnaker’s multi-cloud capabilities as a business differentiator: teams can visualize infrastructure state across all providers and deployment targets in a single view, reducing operational complexity during and after migration.
The CD Foundation
Spinnaker’s governance received a further boost in early 2019 when the Linux Foundation launched the Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF) on March 12. The CDF provides a vendor-neutral home for key open-source CD projects. At launch, the foundation’s project portfolio included:
- Spinnaker — multi-cloud CD platform
- Jenkins — widely used open-source CI/CD automation server
- Jenkins X — cloud-native CI/CD for Kubernetes
- Tekton — Kubernetes-native pipeline framework (also a founding project)
Armory was a founding member of the CD Foundation. Odio expressed strong support for the initiative, framing it as an education and advocacy vehicle: “The CD Foundation is a platform through which cloud-native and leading projects that enable more modern ways to get to production can have a voice.”
He also argued that the broader DevOps community still had work to do in helping engineering leadership at large organizations understand that continuous delivery is a strategic priority, not simply a tooling choice: “DevOps is strategic, it’s no longer just tactical.”
Key Takeaways
- Armory builds an enterprise distribution of the open-source Spinnaker CD platform using an open-core model.
- Its $28M Series B (announced August 2019) was intended to expand product capabilities and go-to-market for Global 2000 customers.
- Proprietary capabilities include air-gap deployment support and GitOps-style pipelines as code.
- Spinnaker’s multi-cloud architecture makes it suited for hybrid cloud migration scenarios.
- Armory is a founding member of the Linux Foundation’s Continuous Delivery Foundation, alongside Jenkins, Jenkins X, and Tekton.