Software delivery platform provider Harness has acquired intellectual property and technology from Armory, a CD company, to expand its capabilities in that area for an enhanced developer experience and better productivity.
Armory’s CD platform is built on top of the open-source Spinnaker project, a multicloud continuous delivery platform that can accommodate high-velocity deployments. Harness CEO Jyoti Bansal told SD Times in an interview that the companies have a lot of competitive overlap but he said there is a synergy in bringing the two teams together to innovate further, adding that “we are excited to bring those people into the Harness fold.”
Secondly, he said, Harness wants to deliver to Armory’s customers a continuation of a world-class deployment and continuous delivery platform, as well as offering a path to migrate to a next-generation platform like Harness.
Bansal noted that the Armory product line will stay “mostly independent,” but Harness will “selectively cherry-pick pieces from the Armory code and technology that are interesting and we’ll add those technologies in those areas to the Harness CD platform.’
Harness, Bansal said, has been expanding heavily into a broad platform for DevOps, adding feature flags, cloud cost management, chaos engineering, and engineering insights. “We see a lot of this kind of convergence happening in the DevOps industry, with integrated broad platforms like ours emerging,” he said.
In November, Armory announced that its Continuous Deployment-as-a-Service capabilities extend to AWS Lambda, simplifying the serverless deployment landscape. “Serverless had promise but hit a wall, and Kubernetes took over,” Adam Frank, Armory’s CMO, told SD Times at the time. “Now we’re seeing a resurgence in serverless.”
Armory, he said, also has been working to empower platform engineers to make developers’ lives easier. “We’re seeing a shift down,” he said, noting how organizations are moving toward creating internal developer platforms that integrate development life cycle tools such as CD.