News

CircleCI Gives its CI/CD Platform a Shot in the ARM

• By John K. Waters
• April 1, 2021

CircleCI, the continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) company, is planning to add new features to its namesake platform based on the Arm architecture and a collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS), the company announced this week.

The company says it will soon be offering a cloud-hosted compute option for users to build, test, and deploy applications with Arm Neoverse-based compute on AWS Graviton2 instances. Arm Neoverse is a high-performance Arm microarchitecture aimed at the server market. AWS Graviton2 processors feature capabilities that enable developers to run cloud-native applications securely, and at scale.

The CircleCI platform is designed to automate software delivery at scale, so dev teams can build, test, and deploy software quickly. It allows teams to stop worrying about maintaining complex and fragile build systems, the company says, and focus on shipping code to their customers.

CircleCI is now one of the few platforms to offer cloud-based CI/CD services for the Arm architecture, thanks to its partnership with AWS. That partnership makes it possible for the two organizations to allow joint customers to build and test applications compiled for Arm without managing their own systems.

Arm is the chip designer (not manufacturer) behind the silicon in billions of mobile devices. The CircleCI news comes on the headline-grabbing heels of the new Armv9 architecture announcement.

"While always valued for its power efficiency, the Arm platform continues to make dramatic improvements in performance as it becomes ubiquitous across a wide variety of hardware platforms," said Stephen O'Grady, principal analyst at RedMonk, in a statement. "With these improvements, its importance as an enterprise development and deployment platform has skyrocketed. Businesses are not asking but requiring that their infrastructure software run on Arm. CircleCI's just-announced support for the Arm Graviton2 platform, therefore, is built to meet precisely this demand."

The practice of CI/CD has improved engineering team performance and velocity greatly since it moved from the bleeding edge to the mainstream. CircleCI expanded its ecosystem last year to support that move with the introduction of the CircleCI developer hub, a dedicated resource library to help engineering teams at companies of all sizes maintain evolving software stacks and optimize CI/CD pipelines.

“With the Arm architecture reaching critical mass, more and more developers want to capitalize on the Arm-powered AWS Graviton2 processor’s performance capabilities and cost benefits,” said David Brown, VP of the Amazon EC2 group at AWS, in a statement. “With CircleCI on AWS, developers can now take advantage of AWS Graviton2 processors to build and test their applications for Arm without managing their own machines, so they can focus on building great apps.”