The Packer team has released the Packer Plugin SDK, a standalone Go module for developing Packer plugins, to support the growing ecosystem and community-driven component development. This release aims to lower the barrier to entry for creating and maintaining Packer plugins by providing a standardized API and simplifying plugin development. The new SDK offers features such as support for plugins with multiple components, automatic plugin downloads via the `packer init` command, and improved maintenance burden. To ensure compatibility, users of community-built plugins will need to obtain a new version when upgrading to Packer v1.7.0, while maintainers will need to upgrade their plugins to use the SDK. The release also includes an updated documentation for writing plugins and a CLI tool to aid in the migration process.