How Apple Uses Plugins for Continuous Deployment Success

Dec 7, 2022 by Adam Frank

Reaction to Apple’s Spinnaker Summit 2022 Talk

At the most recent Spinnaker Summit, Joe Cavanagh and Benjamin Powell from Apple discussed how they maximize code reuse, eliminate repository maintenance, and unify their CI/CD process across many plugins. They also discussed the mutual benefits of a well-maintained organizational plugin ecosystem for Spinnaker users, developers, and operators. 

Check out their talk below to learn about how they accelerate plugin development at their organization.

Accelerating Collaborative Plugin Development – Joe Cavanagh & Benjamin Powell, Apple, Inc., Delivered at Spinnaker Summit 2022

Apple + Plugins = Why Does it Matter? 

Apple is a mature organization that—like most large organizations—tries to operate with as little risk as possible. Theoretically, choosing to use plugins could open up their environments to outside threats and challenges.

And yet, as indicated in this talk, they have been having success reliably and securely implementing plugins. It’s a great lesson for mature and emerging companies alike; if Apple can work out the threats and fully capitalize on usings plugins for their business, you probably can, too. 

What Does Apple Recommend for Spinnaker Plugins?

In their talk at Spinnaker Summit 2022, Joe and Ben relayed the following pieces of advice.

What is the Spinnaker Plugin Framework?

The Spinnaker Plugin Framework, developed by Armory and Netflix, allows developers to extend Spinnaker’s capabilities and add new features using a simple set of APIs and tools. These APIs allow developers to easily integrate new features into their applications without having to write code from scratch. 

The Spinnaker Plugin Framework provides developers with an easy way to create custom plugins for their specific needs. It enables developers to create custom plugins that can be integrated with existing Spinnaker services, such as cloud providers, infrastructure providers, and artifact repositories. 

Spinnaker’s plugin framework can significantly benefit an organization by empowering technical users to solve their own problems. And in today’s world of fast-paced innovation, companies need to be able to solve their own problems and deploy applications quickly and easily.

For tech giants like Apple, this is especially true. And their learnings from working with plugin frameworks can help other organizations conquer these challenges head-on.

Learn More about the Spinnaker Plugin Framework:

Read the Spinnaker Plugin Documentation:

Scale Agent Success Story

One of the largest technology companies in the world relies on Scale Agent to deploy to hundreds of Kubernetes clusters, across multiple environments, across multiple teams. Learn about this enterprise customer’s success with multiple environments using Scale Agent for Spinnaker & Kubernetes.

Share this post:

Recently Published Posts

Continuous Deployments meet Continuous Communication

Sep 7, 2023

Automation and the SDLC Automating the software development life cycle has been one of the highest priorities for teams since development became a profession. We know that automation can cut down on burnout and increase efficiency, giving back time to ourselves and our teams to dig in and bust out innovative ideas. If it’s not […]

Read more

Happy 7th Birthday, Armory!

Aug 21, 2023

Happy 7th birthday, Armory! Today we’re celebrating Armory’s 7th birthday. The parenting/startups analogy is somewhat overused but timely as many families (at least in the US) are sending their kids back to school this week. They say that parenting doesn’t get easier with age – the challenges simply change as children grow, undoubtedly true for […]

Read more

Visit the New Armory Developer Portal

Aug 11, 2023

Easier Access to Tutorials, Release Notes, Documentation, and More! Developer Experience (DX) is one of Armory’s top focuses for 2023. In addition to improving developer experience through Continuous Deployment, we’re also working hard to improve DX for all of our solutions.  According to ThoughtWorks, poor information management and dissemination accounts for a large percentage of […]

Read more