Armory Brings Streamlined Extensibility and an Expanded DevOps Ecosystem to the Spinnaker Community With New Plugin Framework

SAN MATEO, Calif., December 16, 2020 (Newswire.com) - ​Armory, the enterprise software company commercializing Spinnaker, a leading open source continuous delivery platform, today announced the general availability of the open source plugin framework for Spinnaker. 

With the plugin framework, developers can easily extend Spinnaker to meet their organization’s unique needs, as well as expand Spinnaker’s broad suite of integrations with additional DevOps tools and platforms.

Previously, building extensions for Spinnaker typically required deep domain expertise of Spinnaker’s different microservices, and there was no middle ground between building a purely proprietary extension and having a feature go through the process of being incorporated into the open source Spinnaker code base.  

Now, with the availability of the open source plugin framework for Spinnaker, contributors can easily build customizations using a well-defined and documented process. As plugins, these extensions are also easy to re-use and share with the rest of the community. Since enterprises or contributors maintain plugin code separately from the core Spinnaker codebase, plugin updates, maintenance, and sharing are immediate and become part of the independent ecosystem. This provides flexibility for customization while helping to keep the core codebase lean. 

To date, 15 plugins have been created by the community while the framework has been in early release and, now with the general availability, that number is expected to grow significantly in the coming months. Some examples of recently created community plugins include:

• AWS Lambda deployments​
• LitmusChaos chaos experiments stage by MayaData
• Pulumi infrastructure provisioning stage​
• Observability plugin for Spinnaker by Armory

“Most large enterprises have developed custom systems to manage software deployments, which can make it difficult to tune open source Spinnaker, or any software delivery tooling, to their specific needs. The plugin framework makes Spinnaker easily extensible and makes it an order of magnitude more customizable for end users,” said Daniel R. Odio, co-founder and CEO, Armory. “Integrating with existing tools means increased automation, greater productivity, improved functionality, and enhanced value from existing investments in tooling.”

The Spinnaker plugin framework:

• Simplifies integration between Spinnaker and tools used throughout the software development lifecycle, including an enterprise’s preferred security and compliance tools;
• Allows users to customize software delivery workflows to meet specific needs;
• Accelerates Spinnaker’s growing ecosystem while making it easier to participate.

The Spinnaker open source plugin is based on a well-established framework for Java applications, PF4J. The plugin framework creates extension points that serve as standardized interfaces for anyone who wants to create plugins within the different Spinnaker microservices. Details on the plugin framework are available here. Developers who are interested in partnering with Armory to build a Spinnaker plugin can connect with the company here.

The plugin framework also makes it much simpler for software vendors throughout the software development lifecycle to build and share integrations between their products and Spinnaker. 

“We heard from customers that they wanted to use Spinnaker pipelines to deliver infrastructure as code in addition to application changes,” said Joe Duffy, CEO of Pulumi. “Thanks to the new Plugin Framework, Pulumi was able to team up with Armory to quickly deliver an experience across many clouds, including AWS, Azure, GCP, and Kubernetes, and to automate deployments as well as surface rich operations information like deployment logs and policy violations in the Spinnaker Console Output. This has enabled some of our largest customers to harmonize their development and infrastructure teams and ship faster with confidence!”

About Armory

Armory is the company driving modern digital transformation with its enterprise version of Spinnaker. Armory’s scalable, flexible, and secure platform automates software delivery, enabling software teams to ship better software, faster. The core of Armory’s platform is powered by Spinnaker, the continuous delivery platform developed and open-sourced by Netflix and Google to help companies quickly and safely deploy software into multiple clouds. Armory builds on open-source Spinnaker’s foundation, adding proprietary features for bolstered enterprise scale, along with 24×7 enterprise-grade support. Armory’s platform is trusted by dozens of Global 2000 customers in financial services, technology, retail, healthcare and entertainment. Armory is also a proud sponsor of, and contributor to, the Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF), the vendor-neutral home of the fastest-growing projects for continuous delivery.

Founded in 2016, Armory is funded by B Capital, Insight Partners, Crosslink Capital, Bain Capital Ventures, Mango Capital, Y Combinator and Javelin Venture Partners.

Armory is headquartered in San Mateo, Calif. Learn more at www.armory.io.

​Contact Information

Melissa Logan

[email protected]

Source: Armory, Inc.