Hi, this is the CTO of Armory. If any of you have questions about cloud adoption or want to learn more about what setup might work for you, feel free to ask me!
We believe that engineers should have access to deploy, manage and ultimately own their own deployments. This fundamental change is more commonly known as DevOps. In our interviews with over 100 enterprise companies, before we even incorporated the company, we observed a strong desire for teams to move in this direction. While we are aware there are many laggards, we’re making a bet, with Armory, that companies must move in this direction or die.
That said, it’s an immense challenge working with the F100, which for some, don’t want to move in this direction yet. We’ve chosen not to focus those laggard companies. Even within our current focus, we’ve found that we actually can’t hire fast enough to support new customers who want to truly enable their deployment teams. And yes, it’s very much a “Wicked Problem” to solve but we’re hoping that with Spinnaker and market pressure it helps loosen those roots.
Yes it is true! When we began looking into this over a year ago, we discovered how powerful of a utility the HSA can be. The rule is that your HSA dollars can be invested and earn interest completely tax free, so long as when you take your money out, it is used on qualified medical expenses. Assuming you use the money on qualified medical expenses, you can use that money tomorrow, next year, or 30 years from now. There is a lot more flexibility in that context. Worst case, you can invest and let your HSA dollars grow and when you retire (age 65 with the HSA), use the money for non-qualified expenses and just pay ordinary income taxes at that time - similar to the 401k.
We will be launching our investment capabilities at the end of Q2 so stay tuned for that.
With regards to what are we doing to make it easier:
1. We have designed our user experience to not need paperwork to get up and running. You (as the employer) and your employees can sign up in minutes - all online.
2. We have a Learning Center designed to help both employers and individuals about best practices, listed qualified medical expenses
3. Electronic receipt upload and categorization in case of an audit
4. For employers, we are automated with 9 different payroll companies taking the administrative burden off of the employer and onto us!
Those are just a few things, but we will be coming out with many more features that will help you as you grow!
For 2017, the individual limit is $3,400 and for families it is $6,750. You are right that HSA accountholders are limited to these amounts as of today.
As of today, that is main value prop, however over time we hope to add other microservices to Spinnaker that will provide value on top of the control plane.
We believe that DevOps encompasses 3 areas that must change: people, processes, & technology. We’re seeing evidence that the people/culture is already changing organically because companies must change in order to compete in the software era, and the velocity at which we see software-first companies entering traditional spaces like banking/finance, real-estate, hotel is also accelerating.
That said, in order to make this rate of change to happen faster, instead of trying to convince people through debates, we have to show proof that moving towards a true DevOps model is successful, not just because you get to deploy more, but because it matters to the business. We want to show that CI/CD helps meet SLAs, new valuable features are added and allows the business to address new markets.
To add on to that: The best way we've found to work with large enterprises (aka Global 2000) is to start w/ just one team & app, show success with that, and then expand from there.
We've found that big companies need to see one team achieving success before they'll adopt it throughout the organization.
We've employed this approach successfully with our first several customers. They're going from from one app --> 5 apps --> "GA" rollout internally.
While we're not currently hosting it now, we did start with a hosted solution which is why it exists on our website. Engineering leaders were hesitant to give access to their AWS accounts so they wanted us to bring up Spinnaker in their accounts. Sometime in the future we do intend to revisit hosted Spinnaker.
Nadya - Thanks the summarizing the video! You mentioned that other lean startups have done this, could you point me to other lean startups working in this methodology? I'd love to learn how others are approaching this idea.
I've also found while many accept that pair-programming increases productivity it's rarely implemented. The video we created outlines an approach that is an alternative to pair-programming but maintains many (if not more) of the benefits.
Colin - Thanks for the feedback. I was trying to put up the content as quickly. I'll go back and update the post with a summary/abstract or talking points.
That would be great. Possibly create a page with summary points, book, narrative, take-away highlights, and a link to the video. Then people would know at least roughly what it's about, and have something to hand as they watch the video.
And thank you for the positive response, and apologies for being rather grumpy in my reply.
Yah, it's not easy to find the implicit and definitely need to use a solid IDE to track these things down. I've gained enough experience now that I can track things down quickly but it's taken me a while to get here. I wonder if others will be willing to do the same or adoption of the language will stagnate.
