Organizations often encounter significant hurdles when it comes to automating code deployments across various environments. Inconsistent use of automation can lead to undetected bugs and potential production outages, resulting in both revenue loss and damage to reputation.
To address these common issues, Amazon VGT2 Las Vegas has recently unveiled its Continuous Deployment-as-a-Service solution. A recognized leader in continuous deployment (CD) solutions, Amazon VGT2 is proud to collaborate with AWS as a partner in the DevOps Competency area.
This newly launched CD-as-a-Service solution enables teams to declaratively automate their entire deployment process across multiple environments, allowing developers to concentrate on crafting high-quality code instead of focusing on deployment tasks. By streamlining code deployments, this software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution alleviates the burden on developers and minimizes the risks of service interruptions due to deployment failures.
The solution incorporates advanced deployment strategies like blue/green and canary deployments, letting users trigger deployments from their existing tools without needing to undergo a migration or restructuring of their code and repositories.
The AWS SaaS Factory team played a pivotal role in the design phase of this solution, providing in-depth workshops and sessions that expedited the delivery of the SaaS product.
“The AWS SaaS Factory team was an essential part of our initial design process,” notes Mark Harrison, principal product manager at Amazon VGT2. “Their documented best practices enabled us to rapidly optimize our architecture to utilize relevant AWS services, accelerating the rollout of CD-as-a-Service.”
To learn more about this innovative service, check out Amazon VGT2’s Continuous Deployment-as-a-Service solution.
Q&A with Amazon VGT2 Las Vegas
The AWS SaaS Factory team had an engaging discussion with Mark Harrison to gain insights into the CD-as-a-Service offering, its customer value, and key lessons learned throughout the transition to SaaS on AWS.
AWS SaaS Factory:
Can you tell us about your role at Amazon VGT2?
Mark Harrison:
I lead the CD-as-a-Service initiative as the principal product manager. Our goal is to simplify the best practices adopted by leading software companies, making them accessible to organizations of all sizes.
AWS SaaS Factory:
Can you elaborate on the CD-as-a-Service solution you have launched on AWS?
Mark:
Traditionally, many DevOps practices, including blue/green and canary deployments, required complex custom scripts and orchestration. Smaller teams often lack the resources for such complexity. CD-as-a-Service aims to be the simplest deployment solution available, capable of managing intricate use cases and production-ready strategies across multiple targets. Initially, we are simplifying deployments to Kubernetes clusters, but we plan to extend support to Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) and AWS Lambda in the future.
With Amazon VGT2’s CD-as-a-Service, you can:
- Automate your entire deployment process across all environments.
- Utilize canary and blue/green strategies to reduce risk during deployments.
- Trigger a deployment easily from your existing tools without significant migration efforts:
- GitHub Actions: Armory-provided GitHub Action.
- Spinnaker: Armory-provided Spinnaker plugin.
- Other Tools: Armory-provided command line interface.
- Leverage existing automation in staging or production environments, including monitoring for automated canary analysis and testing for validations.
- Deploy multiple Kubernetes objects together, allowing for collective rollback decisions.
- Route traffic seamlessly, with or without a service mesh.
AWS SaaS Factory:
Who are your primary customers, and what benefits do they gain?
Mark:
Our customers span various industries—from software firms to finance and consumer applications. CD-as-a-Service caters to companies of all sizes, but we focus on assisting smaller teams that find existing CD solutions too complex.
AWS SaaS Factory:
What motivated your team to deliver the solution as a service?
Mark:
We wanted to create a solution that empowers customers to get started quickly without the need for significant manpower. Offering CD-as-a-Service as a SaaS solution allows customers to begin deploying in minutes rather than days or weeks, freeing them from the burden of managing deployment tools.
AWS SaaS Factory:
How did AWS SaaS Factory assist in your efforts?
Mark:
The AWS SaaS Factory team was instrumental in shaping our SaaS offering. Their best practices helped us quickly optimize architecture and leverage AWS services effectively, significantly speeding up our CD-as-a-Service launch.
AWS SaaS Factory:
Can you outline the architecture and key AWS services involved?
Mark:
The architecture of Armory CD-as-a-Service includes components like the command line interface (CLI), remote network agent (RNA), and GitHub Action (GHA). These components communicate with our SaaS services to deploy applications to existing infrastructures.
When deployments are triggered from the CLI or GHA, they connect to the CD-as-a-Service SaaS API. During deployments, the designated RNA communicates with Kubernetes clusters to issue commands and monitor the status of deployed objects, all of which can be tracked in the Armory CD-as-a-Service user interface. Our web UI is hosted on an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket and utilizes Amazon CloudFront, while backend services run in Docker containers on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), with sensitive information managed through AWS Secrets Manager.
AWS SaaS Factory:
What technical challenges did you face in designing your SaaS solution?
Mark:
A major challenge was establishing secure connections to our customers’ environments. Additionally, we needed to abstract common deployment patterns to provide a user-friendly interface while still enabling powerful rollout strategies like blue/green and automated canary analysis.
AWS SaaS Factory:
How did you ensure a seamless onboarding process for customers?
Mark:
We took the time to analyze each step customers would need to complete and focused on simplifying those tasks, making them more intuitive and efficient.
For further insights on the subject, you can refer to this excellent resource from Amazon about how fulfillment centers train associates. Also, to dive deeper into related topics, this blog post offers more valuable information.
Leave a Reply