Palantir Apollo Demo Day

Summary

The transcript presents Palantir's Apollo platform as a transformative solution for managing complex software delivery and the modern software supply chain. Apollo enables engineers to write code once and deploy it across diverse environments—on-premises, cloud, and edge—while handling preconditions, dependencies, and infrastructure complexities automatically. It streamlines development by providing SDKs, automating rollouts, managing health checks, and enforcing security policies. Through release channels, canary environments, and detailed monitoring, Apollo ensures safe, reliable, and compliant software deployment at scale. The demo illustrates Apollo’s ability to detect failures, roll back releases, and provide full visibility into software dependencies, security, and operational health, empowering teams to innovate efficiently.

Takeaways

• 🚀 Palantir's Apollo platform addresses existential software delivery problems, ensuring reliable deployment across diverse environments.
• 🌐 Apollo manages software across over 250 customer environments, including cloud, on-prem, and edge systems, supporting critical applications.
• 💡 Developers can write code once for all environments, with Apollo encoding environment-specific preconditions to reduce manual toil.
• ⚙️ Apollo enables distributed teams to release software at different speeds without waiting for slowest dependencies or coordinated release schedules.
• 🛡️ The platform ensures safe upgrades and rollbacks by embedding constraints like schema compatibility and migration steps directly within the system.
• 🔧 Apollo abstracts infrastructure complexity, allowing developers to deploy modern software without deep knowledge of Kubernetes, cloud services, or TLS configuration.
• 📦 Software platforms can be modeled as repeatable, reproducible, and portable via Apollo’s catalog and release channels, enabling scalable multi-environment deployments.
• 📊 Apollo integrates security and compliance checks into the production workflow, automatically recalling releases that violate policies and maintaining software supply chain integrity.
• 🩺 Developers can encode SLOs and health checks into their software, and Apollo can automate monitoring, rollback, and remediation actions based on those metrics.
• 📜 The platform provides full visibility into software dependencies, supply chain, and vulnerabilities, giving teams a centralized, single-pane-of-glass view for better decision-making.
• ⏱️ Apollo enables fast, reliable software delivery at scale, allowing organizations to adapt to increasingly dynamic and complex environments efficiently.

Q & A

What existential problem in software delivery does Palantir identify?

Palantir identifies software delivery and management—specifically the software supply chain—as an existential problem for modern enterprises, highlighted by incidents like SolarWinds and Log4j.

What is Apollo and why was it developed?

Apollo is Palantir's software delivery and management platform, developed to enable reliable, scalable, and secure deployment of software across diverse environments, reducing human toil and operational risk.

How does Apollo allow developers to write code once and run it across multiple environments?

Apollo enables developers to encode environment-specific preconditions alongside their code. The platform then automatically ensures these conditions are met during deployment, allowing the same software to function correctly across cloud, on-prem, and edge environments.

How does Apollo simplify the developer's interaction with complex infrastructure?

Apollo provides an SDK that allows developers to declare software properties, such as replicas, persistent storage, and API endpoints. The platform then generates and manages the necessary infrastructure components, like Kubernetes controllers and TLS certificates, without requiring developers to understand the underlying infrastructure.

What role do release channels play in Apollo's deployment process?

Release channels model the progression of software across multiple environments, allowing non-linear rollouts such as canary deployments. They help teams manage complex deployments consistently while enabling individual development teams to control release inputs.

How does Apollo handle software failures during deployment?

Apollo uses embedded monitors and SLOs to detect failures. If an issue is detected, it can automatically recall a problematic release and roll back affected environments, ensuring minimal disruption and allowing developers to focus on debugging.

How does Apollo integrate security and compliance into software deployment?

Apollo’s software catalog serves as a gate, enforcing policies defined by security and compliance teams. It can automatically recall releases that violate vulnerability policies, integrate with existing DevOps tools, and continuously monitor deployed software for new security risks.

What visibility does Apollo provide regarding the software supply chain?

Apollo gives developers a software bill of materials for each release, showing all dependencies and their versions. This allows teams to quickly assess security risks and compliance, such as checking for vulnerable versions of libraries like Log4j.

How does Apollo ensure software is deployed reliably across diverse environments?

By modeling software and environments in a central catalog, Apollo can manage deployments across multiple cloud providers, on-prem data centers, and edge environments. The platform automates rollouts, monitors health, and enforces preconditions, ensuring consistent operation.

What are the main principles guiding Apollo’s design?

The main principles include: 1) enabling code to run anywhere, respecting environment preconditions; 2) decoupling developers from deep infrastructure knowledge; 3) making deployments repeatable, reproducible, and portable; 4) integrating security and compliance seamlessly; and 5) providing observability and automated remediation through monitoring and SLOs.

How does Apollo benefit operational and development teams in practice?

Operational teams can monitor and manage deployments without needing in-depth knowledge of each service, while developers can focus on building features. Apollo automates rollouts, detects failures, enforces compliance, and provides comprehensive visibility, improving reliability and efficiency.

Why is Apollo particularly relevant in the context of modern software environments?

Modern software environments are highly dynamic, distributed, and complex, often spanning multiple clouds, on-prem systems, and edge devices. Apollo addresses the challenges of deploying, monitoring, and securing software in this environment, providing automation, safety, and transparency.