Harness Continuous Delivery vs Armory

Detailed Feature Comparison

Harness CD Vs. Armory

Before We Begin…

Armory, at its core, is built upon Spinnaker, an open-source CD tool. As such, much of the information contained in this page will be the same as the information contained in the Spinnaker page. There are a few differences, of course, as Armory added some extensibility to Spinnaker by building a few modules on top of it.

However, the main draw to using Armory is the access to support. As an open-source tool, Spinnaker doesn’t provide much in terms of support (basically documentation, the community, and “I hope someone has had this problem before” googling). So, users who do like Spinnaker but want the support aspect have turned to Armory – but it comes at a heavy price.

SaaS & On-Premises:

Currently, Armory is on-prem only. However, they are working on a SaaS offering called Armory Cloud, and users can request beta access. Luckily, it appears the SaaS and on-prem versions will have feature parity. Harness delivers both SaaS and on-prem versions – also with feature parity – so no matter your use case, we’re ready and able to help.

Ease of Use:

Spinnaker is a nightmare to set up and configure, even for organizations with relatively simple setups. The difficulty increases exponentially for organizations with complex CD processes. We’ll happily quote Armory admitting, “It often takes 2-4 full-time engineers to install, operate and configure Spinnaker on-prem.” Prior to July 2020, plugins didn’t exist for Spinnaker. In fact, Armory created the plugin framework that now exists for Spinnaker – which is good progress in terms of opportunities for extensibility.

However, there is a very limited list of available plugins. Other than this repo of example plugins, creators are expected to host plugins in their own repos and choose to make them publicly available or not, so there is no main easy-to-find central plugin index. Alternatively, the Harness platform is designed with simplicity in mind. Engineers can get simple pipelines running in 5 minutes, encouraging adoption and ensuring an easy transition/migration.

Infrastructure Provisioners:

Armory offers a Terraform integration, but so does Spinnaker as of last year – so it’s not a unique feature that should sway one to move to Armory. Additionally, Armory (and Spinnaker, for that matter) doesn’t offer a CloudFormation integration, so you’re tethered to Terraform for all your infra-as-code needs. Harness, however, offers both!

Continuous Verification™:

Continuous Verification is the process of monitoring your app for abnormalities after a deployment. For example, Continuous Verification could catch a latency issue or 5xx errors and automatically roll back your app to the previous version. The idea is to catch errors as quickly as possible – ideally, before customers notice – and make a seamless transition back to the prior version.

Armory provides automatic rollbacks and there are tools that will perform deployment verification with Spinnaker, like Kayenta. Harness, however, provides Continuous Verification out of the box, effectively reducing risk and reputational damage from downtime. As for vendor integrations, Harness supports Prometheus, Datadog, AppDynamics, New Relic, StackDriver, CloudWatch, and custom monitoring and observability tools.

Secrets Management:

Secrets management is one area where Armory differs from Spinnaker. Armory built its own module, Armory Secrets Management, that eschews secrets in plain text, instead allowing users to commit only the location of a secret in a secret store to their configuration files. This means that Armory still depends on third-party secrets managers like HashiCorp Vault (and will accommodate other providers at customer request), but does add a layer of abstraction to the process.

Harness, on the other hand, offers multiple solutions when it comes to secrets management. It can be handled natively with our proprietary secrets manager, or it can integrate with third-party vendors like HashiCorp Vault, Amazon Secrets Manager, Google Secret Manager, AWS Key Management Service, Google Cloud Secret Manager, CyberArk, and Azure Key Vault.

Accelerate Metrics & Reporting:

There are four key metrics when it comes to software development: Lead Time (the average amount of time it takes from the time code is checked in to the version control system to the point in time where it is deployed to production), Deployment Frequency (the number of times deploys to production occur in a time period), Mean Time to Restore (MTTR: how long it takes to resolve or rollback an error in production), and Change Failure Rate (what percentage of changes to production fail).

These metrics are paramount in truly understanding performance. Armory does not offer any Accelerate metrics tracking or reporting – unless you are a Splunk customer as well. In that case, the Armory Splunk app can display them. Harness offers a beautiful dashboard specifically for these metrics and allows you to set alerts as needed – for example, you could set an alert to notify you if the Change Failure Rate goes above 1%.

*Please note: Our competitors, just like us, release updates to their products on a regular cadence. We keep these pages updated to the best of our ability, but there are bound to be discrepancies. For the most up-to-date information on competitor features, browsing the competitor’s new release pages and communities are your best bet.

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