SAN MATEO, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Armory, the open source continuous delivery software company, announced significant growth of its easy-to-use Spinnaker deployments, as the overall user community grew, evidenced in part by the 100% increase in attendees at the upcoming Spinnaker Summit. Spinnaker is the open source, multi-cloud continuous delivery (CD) platform for releasing software changes with high velocity and confidence.

Armory will participate at Spinnaker Summit June 22-24 with a number of sessions discussing the value of making Spinnaker more accessible and easier to use. Armory will take part in a keynote panel session moderated by Kelsey Hightower called A Deep Dive into the Benefits of CD. The Birds of a Feather session titled Continuous Delivery: Spinnaker at Scale includes speakers from Armory, Autodesk, AWS, Cox Automotive, Netflix, and Salesforce.

“Everything we do revolves around making Spinnaker more accessible and easier to use so that engineering teams are able to ship better code faster,” said Daniel R. Odio, co-founder and CEO, Armory. “And that’s achieved by working closely with partners like AWS and customers like Autodesk, who are leading the way by empowering developers and delivering code as efficiently as possible.”

Armory Frees Engineers to Focus on Delivering Value

One way Armory is making Spinnaker more accessible is through its Managed Services Offering, providing expert engineers to manage Spinnaker installations with 24/7 support and guaranteed 99.95% uptime—including break-fix, debugging and troubleshooting. Not only does this offering remove the management overhead of Spinnaker, customers typically see at least a three-times cost savings over hiring an internal team to install, configure, manage and provide 24/7 support of Spinnaker.

“Armory Managed Services eases our life with their expertise—from installation to service management—allowing us to focus on building CI/CD pipelines rather than troubleshooting Spinnaker,” said Leon Xiao, site reliability engineering manager, eHealth.

Scale Spinnaker Deployments to Kubernetes

Armory’s Agent for Kubernetes is a lightweight, scalable service that monitors each Kubernetes cluster and streams changes back to Spinnaker’s Clouddriver service, solving the following problems:

Latency issues that arise when caching large Kubernetes resources in Spinnaker;
Security and access issues that exist when Kubernetes clusters are managed by a central resource;
Bottleneck issues that surface when new Kubernetes clusters require onboarding by a central resource; and
Complexity issues stemming from supporting thousands of Kubernetes clusters that have tens of thousands of objects and multiple edge cases.
Armory and AWS Extend Use of Spinnaker

In collaboration with AWS, Armory recently added blue/green and canary support into Lambda deployments within Spinnaker. Learn more about the Lambda integration and Autodesk’s success with Armory and AWS here.

Armory will also soon be releasing an AWS Quick Start to make it simple to deploy a production-grade instance of Armory on AWS EKS. To learn more, AWS has a workshop scheduled on June 24 about continuous deployment for cloud-native applications that includes hands-on labs from Armory and others.

Simplified Spinnaker Installation

Armory Minnaker is a virtual machine leveraging K3s and the Armory Operator to enable software deployments in 10 minutes instead of 10 days. Armory Minnaker is a full Spinnaker installation packaged inside a virtual machine running the certified K3s Kubernetes distribution. Minnaker automatically handles authentication, security such as SSL/TLS, namespaces, custom resources in Kubernetes (CRD) and more.

Additionally, Armory has created pre-built DevOps pipelines, along with a self-guided tour of the platform to acquaint new users. All of this enables integration of Armory into DevOps toolchains, such as continuous integration (CI) systems, Git repositories, security tools, and targets for software distribution.

Spinnaker

Spinnaker is an open source, multi-cloud continuous delivery platform for releasing software changes with high velocity and confidence. Created at Netflix, it has been battle-tested in production by hundreds of teams over millions of deployments. It combines a powerful and flexible pipeline management system with integrations to the major cloud providers. Learn more at www.spinnaker.io.

Armory

Armory is the company driving modern digital transformation with its enterprise version of Spinnaker. Armory’s scalable, flexible, and secure platform automates software delivery, enabling software teams to ship better software, faster. The core of Armory’s platform is powered by Spinnaker, the continuous delivery platform developed and open-sourced by Netflix and Google to help companies quickly and safely deploy software into multiple clouds. Armory builds on open-source Spinnaker’s foundation, adding proprietary features for bolstered enterprise scale, along with 24×7 enterprise-grade support. Armory’s platform is trusted by dozens of Global 2000 customers in financial services, technology, retail, healthcare and entertainment. Armory is also a proud sponsor of, and contributor to, the Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF), the vendor-neutral home of the fastest-growing projects for continuous delivery.

After a year of full-time remote work, software engineers and team leaders are perfecting daily work routines developed in this solitary setting and simultaneously looking ahead to what the future will bring. Managers say that building new communication habits was key to making the shift to remote work. Development teams had to make adjustments to daily work flows as well, all while working longer hours and dealing with an increased risk of burnout as a result.

Jacqui Vreeland, recruiting manager at Emergent Software, noticed that the pandemic forced many developers to think about the long-term stability of their job.

“Too many people were working in a way that was, frankly, unsustainable before and when the world switched to being fully remote, many people have had to reevaluate what they truly love about their job in the first place when so many in-person benefits have been stripped away,” she said.

Meanwhile, for recruiters and hiring managers, filling open positions is as challenging as ever, even when the candidate pool now reaches worldwide.

Here’s a look at how the job landscape, daily routines and communication skills have changed over the last 12 months as well as what the future may look like.

How the pandemic has changed the job market
David Moise, president of Decide Consulting, is a software developer who now runs an IT staffing and recruiting firm. He said he noticed that managers, directors and vice presidents in IT were let go at a higher rate than other roles while hands-on engineers were not. He said some companies expected the developer to suddenly do their job plus the former manager’s job while other companies realized that the extra load had to be dispersed among everyone.

Moise said that letting go of managers meant that making decisions about digital transformation strategies was that much harder. Many companies threw out the old technology roadmap to adapt to the demands of the pandemic, but in some cases there were no managers to make decisions about software and tech stacks, he said.

Moise said that hiring is harder now in part because required skill sets are longer and more specific.

“Just a couple of years ago if you are looking for a developer, you had 20 options on skills and you needed to match 10,” he said. “Now you have 75 and you need to match 25.”

Mary Lee Olson, head of talent at Rollbar, said that companies should expand their hiring scope to the entire world.

“Expanding your geographical reach to find talent presents its own, new challenges but it’s a pivot companies must make,” she said.

Rollbar helps fix critical errors by using real-time alerts and AI-assisted workflows.

Gabrielle Hendryx-Parker, CEO of software consultancy company Six Feet Up, said hiring has become somewhat easier thanks to a truly global job market. She has employees in 15 time zones. One disadvantage is that such a large pool puts stress on compensation packages as smaller developer teams compete in a global marketplace, creating discrepancies based on company size, reputation and location.

“Over time, I expect compensation differences to level out, but for now, it’s common to see candidates asking for up to 3 times what you are expecting to pay for a technical position,” she said.

Adjusting the daily routine
For some development teams, the overnight shift to 100% remote work was a catalyst for improvements. Jay Leaf-Clark, head of IT at Dashlane, said the shift to remote work forced his company to change support and maintenance models within IT.

“We’ve rapidly adapted to an already incoming, and frankly, welcomed new way of managing IT that has up until now, been slowed in most organizations due to the battle between IT leaders and leadership on allocating the budget and time to make these dreams a reality,” he said.

Leaf-Clark said that this transformation will have long-term benefits as this new display of agility proves that his department can handle whatever the future has in store.

Alberto Giorgi, director of engineering at Tray.io, a low-code workflow automation company, said that remote work inspired his team to take a new look at internal processes from prioritizing asynchronous and written communication, ensuring a strong meeting etiquette to finding new ways to collaborate more effectively and increase the team’s overall productivity.

Giorgi said that demand for proper IT support for DevOps practitioners in particular increased significantly in the early days of the pandemic as companies faced a growing backlog in their deployment and development processes.

Another challenge was that the spike in Zoom meetings meant that developers lost time that would have been dedicated to writing code, which reduced overall efficiency, he said.

“To combat these challenges, many development teams took to the dual strategy of using API integrations and workflow automation to increase productivity,” he said.

The key to this approach is making sure that tools for important use cases such as source code control, continuous integration and delivery, and issue tracking can seamlessly pass data to each other.

“To streamline processes, smart devops teams looked to API integrations to connect their tech stack to avoid having to copy and re-copy issue logs and other data across multiple platforms,” he said.

Giorgi said automation has allowed his team to focus more resources on strategic projects while streamlining away time-consuming manual work.

Building new communication habits
Many workers miss the spontaneous chats in the breakroom or taking lunch with colleagues. For developers, not being able to walk over to a colleague’s cube to ask a question was a more serious problem. Alex Yelenevych, co-founder and chief marketing and product officer at CodeGym, an online platform for learning Java, said that developers had to adjust to the lack of in-person communication.

“Sometimes teammates didn’t understand some tasks in writing without further explanation, even a video call didn’t help,” he said. “We just started to formulate our tasks more precisely.”

Hendryx-Parker of Six Feet Up said that the pandemic has made internal communication critical.

“Having to deal with isolation made it all the more obvious that soft skills are actually essential in development to keep high performing teams going,” she said.

Yelenevych said that as people started to work longer hours, professional burnout began to manifest itself much earlier and deeper.

Hendryx-Parker said that by the fall, she saw developer burnout due to lopsided work/life balance.

“Working at home was especially challenging for developers with children, as they were putting longer hours while at the same time acting as educators and caretakers,” she said.

Yelenevych sees a hybrid schedule with some days at home and some days at the office as the optimal approach.

Stanly Community College (SCC) and VMware, Inc. now offer a Reboot scholarship program for veterans to attain VMware Certified Professional Datacenter Virtualization (VCP-DCV).

The Reboot scholarship program, funded by the VMware Foundation, started its first class in February with 20 veterans in the initial cohort working to obtain VMware Certified Professional status.

“We are thrilled to be a part of the Reboot program for veterans,” SCC President Dr. John Enamait said.

We value our partnership with VMware. As the role of virtualization broadens, I feel confident that our faculty will continue to teach the skills necessary for veterans to excel in today’s technology environment.”

The goal of the program is to provide a pathway for veterans to become VCP-DCV certified. As one of the most recognized virtualization certifications in the industry, VCP-DCV provides veterans with a pathway to employment in the IT industry.

Gilmore Global, the e-book provider for the VMware Academy, donated e-books to the veterans for use in the class. Between the VMware scholarships and Gilmore’s donations, the classes are free to the veterans.

“It is so exciting to be a part of the Reboot program for veterans, as well as speak to the class on my military background and career journey,” said Miles Tiglao, senior manager of Americans Solution Engineering Strategy and Operations at VMware. “The skills and hands-on learning veterans are learning are endless. Education has really changed a lot and obtaining a valuable industry certification, such as VMware, will be relevant for years to come. The talent is short and the jobs are there. As of February 2021, the national wage average for a VMware Certified Professional was $141,000 a year.”

Brandon Crump, lead instructor for the Reboot program, added, “The program provides funding for veterans to take the Install, Configure and Manage (ICM) class. Once veterans complete the ICM class, they will receive a voucher to take the VMware Certified Technical Associate-Data Center Virtualization (VCTA-DCV), the first step to becoming VCP-DCV certified. Veterans who successfully complete the ICM class will then be eligible to take Optimize and Scale v7. Upon successful completion of Optimize and Scale v7, veterans will receive a discount voucher to take the VCP-DCV.”