News

CircleCI Adds Enterprise-Focused Capabilities to Growing CI/CD Ecosystem

• By John K. Waters
• December 16, 2020

Continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) platform provider CircleCI has announced new platform additions aimed at furthering the extensibility of its platform and growing ecosystem.

The list of additional capabilities, integrations, and features added to the company's CI/CD platform includes: 

• A new version of the company's server hosting option, Server 3.0. This self-hosted solution was designed to provide new users with CI/CD under the strictest security, compliance, and regulatory restraints, the company says. Server 3.0 offers the ability to scale under load and run multiple services at once, all within a private Kubernetes cluster and network on Google Kubernetes Engine or Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). "Server 3.0 will work well for teams that have in-house DevOps and Kubernetes expertise, have their own data centers, or have other highly custom needs that can't be served elsewhere," the company says.

• New functions in the company's reusable configuration offering, "orbs." CircleCI's orbs are open-source, shareable packages of parameterizable, reusable configuration elements, including jobs, commands, and executors. Orbs automate thousands of repeated DevOps processes. The company says it has nearly doubled its orb registry, which currently offers more than 2,000 orbs.

• New integrations with Terraform, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Codecov, and others "to deepen efficiency, productivity, and scale for users," the company says, along with a new Slack orb that allows users to customize and receive unlimited event notifications.

• A new self-hosted solution, CircleCI runner, which allows users to build and release on a wider variety of architectures, and have the ability to choose which jobs run in the cloud and on their own infrastructure. "Our goal for the runner is to provide our users with maximum flexibility, so we built it to run in any environment in any cloud or on premises, regardless of how your network is designed," said CircleCI product manager Alexey Klochay, in a blog post.

• A new partnership with Arm with support for Arm64 architecture. "Recently, the Arm architecture has rapidly gained traction in edge compute, desktop and laptop computers, data center servers, and more," Klochay said. "Arm-powered processors can deliver significant performance and efficiency benefits, and have become nearly ubiquitous in mobile and IoT devices for this reason. As the footprint of Arm architecture has grown, so too has the demand for Arm-based CI/CD solutions. With the addition of Arm support on our self-hosted runners, it's now possible for those developing on Arm to run their CircleCI pipelines on Arm resources.

"The idea of automation, of being able to move quickly and reliably, is no longer 'nice to have;' but core to the responsibilities of today's engineering teams," said CircleCI, CEO Jim Rose, in a statement. "CI/CD is a mission-critical yet complex component to achieving this, which is why we have been singularly focused on solving this challenge for customers over the last nine years. CircleCI's latest additions will make it easier for even more teams to access the most intelligent and performant CI/CD tooling on the market."
 
CircleCI processes 2 million jobs and 100,000 projects per day, the company says.