What’s New this Week July 6, 2020

Welcome back from the July 4th long weekend, and welcome to our bi-weekly feature development roll-up, with updates on features from Experiments through to GA. This is our way of taking you on the journey of “How an Idea Becomes a Feature” at Armory. You can track features as they go from Experiment to Early Release and then to General Availability. Here is a link to the Early Release, Beta, and GA definitions at Armory.

Check out these blog posts for a deeper dive:

• How Armory’s Kubernetes Agent Helps Enterprises Scale Spinnaker
• Continuous Delivery using Spinnaker on Amazon EKS
• CEO Interview: Ensuring Cloud Foundry’s Success with Spinnaker + What’s Coming

Below please find details on features we are building.

New Experiments

What is an Experiment? An experiment is a test version for us to present to you, our users, ideas on how to solve some of your pain points. This is your opportunity to provide us feedback. We want to hear the good, the bad, and the ugly, so we can create the best feature to solve your problem.

• No new experiments this sprint, though we did all experiment with fun ways to celebrate a socially-distant 4th of July. Ever wonder what a fireworks show looks like in reverse? Check this out!

In Progress

We’re working on several exciting projects, we like to be transparent and share updates so you can see what’s coming up!

• Spinnaker Plug-Ins
  • What is it?
    • The Spinnaker Plug-in framework leverages PF4J to simplify the loading and management of third-party extensions in Spinnaker. This helps to create a Spinnaker project with a lean core and an extensive ecosystem, and makes it much easier to extend Spinnaker for your particular needs. 
  • What’s new and what are the benefits?
    • ResourceType Extension Point (in Fiat): Adding this extension point to the plug-in framework will help to enable the Policy Engine and cloud provider plug-ins, as well as any other plug-ins that intend to work with Spinnaker’s Fiat authorization services
  • Where can I learn more?
    • Interested in learning more about plug-ins, or in creating some? Reach out to us at [email protected]
• Kubernetes Agent (Kubesvc)
  • What is it?
    • The Kubernetes Agent is a highly performant service for Kubernetes that enables Spinnaker to smoothly scale to deploying to thousands of Kubernetes clusters with minimal latency. The Agent sits between the clouddriver and the Kubernetes clusters, enabling better caching and eliminating a number of other scaling issues 
  • What’s new and what are the benefits?
    • We have begun our pilot program for the feature and are implementing it with select Where can I learn more? 
      • Sign up to be an Armory Design Partner or reach out to us here to learn more.
  • Spinnaker Plug-Ins
    • What is it?
      • The Spinnaker Plug-in framework leverages PF4J to simplify the loading and management of third-party extensions in Spinnaker. This helps to create a Spinnaker project with a lean core and an extensive ecosystem, and makes it much easier to extend Spinnaker for your particular needs. 
    • What’s new and what are the benefits?
      • Clouddrivers as Plug-Ins: We are enabling clouddriver plug-ins for Spinnaker, which will make it easier and faster to build, update, and enable Spinnaker clouddrivers. This latest sprint, we enabled Atomic Operators within plug-ins, which are a key component for how clouddrivers work within Spinnaker. We’ve added this capability into the example Nomad clouddriver plug-in that we have created.
      • Example Plug-in for Fetching Artifacts: We’ve added the ability for plug-ins to fetch artifacts – check out the example plug-in here!
    • Where can I learn more?
      • Please email [email protected] – we’d love to speak with you.
  • Spinnaker Plug-Ins: Pulumi
    • What is it?
      • At the recent Spinnaker Gardening Days hackathon, Pulumi was able to quickly create a plug-in for Spinnaker, allowing Spinnaker users to leverage Pulumi’s powerful, open source infrastructure-as-code platform. Check out the demo here!
    • What’s new and what are the benefits?
      • Over the last few weeks, we’ve worked with the Pulumi team to enhance the plug-in and the plug-in framework. Integrating Pulumi’s world-class infrastructure management capabilities with Spinnaker’s leading CD platform provides users with powerful control over their software delivery lifecycle, eliminating manual handoffs, enabling just-in-time infrastructure, and, combined with Armory’s Pipelines as Code feature, creating a GitOps workflow for software delivery.
    • Where can I learn more?
      • Check out the docs here. Reach out to the Armory plug-in team at [email protected], or to the Pulumi team here.

  General Availability

  What is general availability? This is a feature we have added and fully support in our product offering. Please let us know what is working well, and what you’d like to see expanded, added, or improved.
  • Armory Release v2.20.2
    • We’ve released Armory v2.20.2! This latest release upgraded Armory Spinnaker to the latest OSS patch release, as well as addressed a number of bugs. Check out the docs here!
  • PCF Clouddriver Fixes
    • Earlier this year, Armory partnered with VMware to provide ongoing support for the PCF clouddriver. Over this latest sprint, we addressed bugs and made general improvements to the clouddriver to keep it performant and up-to-date. If you are a Spinnaker/PCF user, reach out to us here to learn more about how Armory is working with PCF users to maximize the value they get out of Spinnaker. 
  Here are the latest release notes:
  • Armory Release v2.20.2
  We appreciate your feedback – let us know what you think! Want to get an early release or need any help configuring these features? Contact us here.
  Armory’s platform exists to help make software delivery continuous, scalable, and safe. If you want to try these or any other Armory features, you can:
  • Try installing our platform here.
  • Get trained on Spinnaker — including Spinnaker 101 training.
  • Become an Armory customer. Contact us here.