danielodio

Caleb, we’re Armory, W17. This does indeed sound like an interesting use case for Spinnaker, as Jacques said. Happy to chat with you about it. DROdio@Armory.io (we are commercializing Spinnaker — http://www.Armory.io )

@michelvocks -- the Armory team would love to hear more about the challenges you had with Spinnaker. (We're commercializing an enterprise version of OSS Spinnaker).

Also, we've created a 'pipelines as code' feature called Dinghy that may have helped. And our installer & configurator provides a much smoother install & configure experience. Details at www.Armory.io

Hit us up at hello@armory.io if you have more specific feedback (our exec team reads emails to that addy).

DROdio

Hey @thermodynthrway -- CEO of Armory here. You can give our enterprise distribution a try at http://go.Armory.io/install

We'd love to hear how it goes for you!

Armory.inc| San Mateo, Ca (close to caltrain |Senior Software Engineers |Full-time ONSITE (no remote) | We are looking for passionate product focused Senior Engineers that are interested in cloud deployments. We are building a platform that helps software teams ship better software faster. Apply here then send an email to recruiting@Armory.io with "Applied from Hacker news" in the title so we can be sure to prioritize your application.

We're Armory, YC W17. We're commercializing Spinnaker and happy to answer questions about it. (Or just drop us a line at hello@armory.io )

Armory.io | Senior Software Engineers | San Mateo, Ca(close to caltrain) | ONSITE(no remote) |

We are looking for passionate, product focused Senior Engineers that are interested in cloud infrastructure. [Apply here](https://jobs.lever.co/armory/f42bb3d2-0b94-450d-b1cb-5156600...) then send an email to recruiting@Armory.io with "Applied from Hacker News" in the title so we can be sure to prioritize your application.

We've helped a number of companies get Spinnaker working. Happy to chat w/ you, just email hello@armory.io (and reference this YC post to ensure it gets routed correctly).

Here are some resources that might be helpful:

http://blog.armory.io/how-spinnaker-fits-into-the-continuous...

http://blog.armory.io/spinnaker-is-not-a-build-server-and-ot...

http://docs.armory.io/

Hope that helps!

We've written a bunch about Spinnaker & K8s at http://go.Armory.io/kubernetes ; hope that's helpful!

Super simple but surprisingly effective. Helps product & engineering understand what pain customers are expressing.

Happy to detail how we set it up if anyone wants to try it in their org.

Completely disagree re: Paper. It's one of the most-used tools at our company, and we love it.

Yeah that mindset shift was the hardest part of transitioning from a traditional ops to a no-ops approach at our last company. The technology has no chance if the culture isn't ready.

We especially see this with F500 companies. They insist on multiple manager approvals for deployments. CI/CD is really scary to them because it feels too risky.

One of our prospective customers (at a F500 company) told us about how they have a cross-functional deployment 'swat team' that all gather in a room on a Friday night and literally press a button to deploy the update, then see what happens. They take their website offline in anticipation of errors (and put up the '90s construction worker logo) and then their ops people get paged over the weekend to deal w/ errors. Just ridiculous!

The irony is that the slower deployment velocity creates more risk, making deployments scary affairs. It's a terrible cycle. Deploying 7x per year means each deployment contains many more features/fixes, which introduces more risk. Vs. breaking a monolith up into microservices, and letting each component deploy at whatever cadence is best for it. And with Spinnaker each deployment can be traced back to the original git commit hash / jira ticket / etc., creating much more transparency in the deployment process.

ahaha nice -- you can learn more about Igor here: https://github.com/spinnaker/igor/blob/master/README.md

Sounds like AWS needs Spinnaker for easy rollbacks! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13776456

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.

Here's a deeper dive on Spinnaker, and on how Armory is commercializing it for enterprises: http://go.Armory.io/Evaluate

Ben is going to talk about the 'as a service piece' in a minute. Here's pricing info: http://go.Armory.io/pricing

Armory (YC W17) | Sr. Engineer | San Mateo, CA | Onsite, Fulltime http://go.armory.io/peek

Armory's looking for employees #3 & #4, sr. engineers. Get in early to a funded startup; influence the outcome.

We are a seed + YC funded, early stage (6 month old) startup with real paying customers.

If you are a polyglot who loves startups then please apply at http://go.Armory.io/polyglot . You’ll never talk to a recruiter, ever. We offer same day offers as your onsite interview whenever possible.

Engineers at companies should be empowered to deploy their own code, in the background, continuously, without downtime or errors. We are working on making commercializing Spinnaker, an open source immutable infrastructure CD platform from Netflix that enables blue/green deploys, canaries & rollbacks, so it “just works” for the enterprise by injecting safety, velocity, intelligence, auditing, and compliance.

Get a peek under the hood at http://go.Armory.io/peek

We've created v0.61 to solve the following problem: Spinnaker is powerful but hard to install and configure; lots of sub-services. We've created a package that 'just works' to make it easier to install. Would love to hear feedback from anyone who gives it a try.

I would love to hear anyone's experiences with spinnaker. What's great? What's not?

I do CrossFit and IF.

CrossFit on fast days is easy.

Doing it the day after a fast day is hard.

I write more about it at http://go.DanielOdio.com/health

Amazing to see IF & Ketogenic entering the mainstream.

I was on the verge of metabolic syndrome, with a 38 inch waist, high triglycerides and high cholesterol. http://go.DanielOdio.com/health In 10 months of IF I've lost 60 pounds. http://go.DanielOdio.com/fasting

I've also experimented with Ketosis for four months http://go.DanielOdio.com/ketosis and now with "Blue Zones" http://go.DanielOdio.com/guide

Love seeing so much of this gaining a broader audience.

Yeah it's very true... nothing like being an early adopter with your retirement nest egg! :-|

Same here on all counts!

Sorry to hear it -- I'm sure it's eating away at you. I'm a founder who's had to do it too, in the past. It never gets easier; you just get better at it.

I agree with @steven2012's feedback. To add a few things:

1) I'd recommend you work with your attorneys to draft up a termination agreement that includes a severance package. I'd also recommend you cut a check and include it with the letter. When you sit them down to talk them through the agreement (individually), you can present check to them and ask them to sign it and take the check. You don't want to force them into signing anything, but you also do want to try to get it done cleanly and completely for the sake of the business moving forward. If they hesitate or say they want to review the terms later, or with an attorney, don't push it. But do make the check large enough that it'll be easy for them to sign on the spot if at all possible -- you want to treat them fairly and not have to deal with loose ends later if you can help it.

2) It's extremely important to take the "one and done" deeper cut approach. There's nothing worse than everyone wondering when the other shoe is going to drop. I'd recommend you take the remaining team out to lunch and make sure they know that they are safe -- and you all have to rally together to make the company a success.

As an aside -- the only regret I've ever had is waiting to fire people that I knew had to go. Learning to be more aggressive about moving under-performers out faster has been one silver lining from the whole process, over time.

Good luck. It's a terrible foreboding feeling going into it, but you'll fee a big sense of relief afterwards, and if the employees you're letting go are unhappy in their jobs, they may end up thanking you later for helping them move on to find something they loved more.

Update: Lots of opinions here. I posted this question to a few startup FB groups. Here are some of the answers I got from founder CEOs in those groups:

- CEO of an NYC startup: "We certainly don't have a summer Friday policy, but I'd say in general I don't love Friday afternoons. People definitely leave pretty early. We had to move our meetings back to the afternoons." [I assume he's saying they did that to keep employees from leaving]

- European startup founder: "Same thing at publishing companies in London, more or less all year long. I'm not sure why there's those policies in the media space. I'm not planning on setting up anything like that… we're not a billion dollar company yet"

- Startup founder: "Yeah if you do summer Fridays are for banks, big cos, you know the place where people take this for granted... do not recruit people who want this."

- Startup founder: "As an east coast company we don't do that, but there certainly is an expectation to take more vacations and have more flexibility during the summer months. The main and obvious difference here versus the west coast is that you guys have nice weather year round"

- Startup CTO: "[At my last large media company gig we] had Summer Fridays but you'd visit the office at 5pm on Fridays and we'd usually all be there. To me, it's like the startups that have no vacation policy ("if you want to go, go"). Trust your employees. If you hired right, they'll appreciate the gesture but only take you up on it when it makes sense. That said, when people do use it, I think the 'Summer Fridays' don't guarantee there are post-work events (people could get an early start on skipping town)."

- Startup accelerator founder: "This is not some new phenomenon; This has been going on with startups for many years - even pre dotcom. Work always happens at these post work events and people take time to recharge - if you hired right, you need not worry, as people with shit to do stay and do it, and others get more efficient, if even for a short while. It is also a great time to recruit folks and I know I have seen a lot of folks hiring recently."

Thanks for the 411, Eric. Esp helpful re: "I don't know of any startups that offer this"

RE: "Why do companies do summer fridays? In the northeast, you typically have about 2-3 months where the weather is nice enough to go to the beach."

Yeah so this is exactly why I'm wrestling with it. I totally get that it's an opportunity to enjoy the weather in the NE, and the culture is to hit the Hamptons or Fire Island etc., and that a lot of other colleagues are out there too. But another key part of what you said is "[These companies] often are profitable." So I'm super curious to know what high-growth, private, not-yet-profitable startups in NYC do.

I guess one way to think about it is: In SF many of us take 3-5 days off, at once, for Burning Man. In NYC they space it out over summer Friday afternoons.

I've tried both Wealthfront and Betterment and found Betterment to be much more usable. It's out-performed Wealthfront in the past 9 months or so (but over the long-term my guess is that they'll both perform similarly) Have you tried both? http://danielodio.com/betterment-vs-wealthfront-which-one-wi...

Agreed and that's how I've always seen it as well. But when my friends expressed surprise at the obligation, I realized it may not be as clear cut to everyone as it has been to me.

Or I guess to put it another way -- the obligations exist whether we recognize them or not; maybe the value here is in practicing the recognition of the obligation vs. the creation of it.

I'm seeing lots of opinions from people who don't do CrossFit.

Here's one from someone who actually is doing CrossFit:

I'm a member at the CrossFit Palo Alto (CFPA) box (that's what we call the gyms, because they're typically a sparse box-shaped gym). I've also dropped in on other boxes across the country, which I do when I'm traveling.

The #1 thing to know about CrossFit is that while it's a 'brand,' it's not a consistent experience between boxes. It's actually very, very different. Erin's post doesn't make a ton of sense to me because it's as if she's saying "I don't date men, because all men are jerks." Some men are, but some aren't. It's the same with CrossFit. I'm sure that the things she described actually happened to her at a CrossFit box, but they've never happened to me at CFPA.

I've been to boxes where I wouldn't go back. But CrossFit at CFPA has been life changing for me as an entrepreneur. It's one hour, three times per week. I get a very high ROI off of those three hours of commitment. I've been at it for a year now and while I was intimidated when I first started, I've gotten to the point where I look forward to the workouts now. The thing that's great about CrossFit is how it makes the other things you do in your daily routine easier. I'm a new dad and I carry my daughter in a bjorn, which means I have to squat when she drops something and I have to pick it up. CrossFit has made squatting easy, for example.

CrossFit can be disastrous if you don't know how to keep from pushing yourself harder than you should. Everything at CFPA is tempered with weight decisions that are very personal. I've never once felt pressured to go to a higher weight; if anything I was frustrated early on because the coaches wouldn't let me go as high as I thought I could. Some boxes likely aren't as good at monitoring that.

United Barbell up in SF is good, as is Horsepower in LA. Those are the three boxes I've been to that I thought were very professionally (and safely) run. Hope that helps.