CircleCI blog

“It worked on my machine, but broke in production” is a common issue engineers run into on a regular basis. CircleCI 1.0 users have found it useful to debug such build failures by using SSH access, which we have now enabled for builds running on our 2.0 platform.

Additionally for 2.0, we have introduced CircleCI CLI, which helps users reproduce the CircleCI environment locally. This functionality allows users to iterate quickly and debug issues in their local environment.

A few weeks ago we participated in DevOps Wall St., a 1-day event in Manhattan with speakers from FINRA, GitHub, Waffle.io, Modus Create, and others. Rob Witoff from Coinbase shared his thoughts in a talk called, “Security, Scalability, Productivity: Embracing a DevOps Mindset at Coinbase with CircleCI.” In this talk, Rob discussed correlating success with number of deploys, killing snowflake servers, automating good behavior with UX, and whose fault it is when something goes wrong in production (hint: not the deploying engineer’s).

Here are some highlights from Rob’s talk:

• (02:00) Rob shares stats on Coinbase: 100 services, 30+ countries, 6M+ users, 4.5 deploys/engineer/week
• (04:50) Rob talks about the engineering change request (ECR) process he used to have to go through in previous companies and why bureaucratic software development is not empowering, particularly when velocity is core to your survival.
• (06:35) “If you empower your company to move fast, iterate, and launch new features, you can help your company survive. DevOps done poorly can also be a reason companies die. If a company is not able to move fast enough because security slows you down, or there’s too much human interaction, you can really kill your company.”

Image Source

Estragon
Vladimir

ACT I
An open office. A circular dependency.
Evening.

Estragon, sitting on a low ball, is trying to reboot his computer. He pushes the power button with both hands, panting. He gives up, exhausted, rests, tries again. As before.

Enter Vladimir.

ESTRAGON:
(giving up again)
Nothing to be done.

VLADIMIR:
I’m beginning to come round to that opinion. All my life I’ve tried to debug it, saying Vladimir, be reasonable, you haven’t yet tried everything. And I resumed the struggle.

(He broods, musing on the struggle. Turning to Estragon.)

So there you are again.

Mobile developers are tasked with writing code and publishing builds faster than ever before. You don’t need to go far to find stats that show developers are pushing code with increased frequency – measured in minutes, hours, and days rather than weeks and months. As a result, security can become an afterthought – or something handled by someone else on the other side of the office, on another floor, or elsewhere in the organization.

But, a recent Ponemon study on IoT and mobile apps shows that mobile app security is top-of-mind for many organizations. Sixty percent of respondents reported a data breach resulting from an insecure mobile app, and 39 percent of organizations wait until production to test, driving up the cost to fix flaws considerably.

Machine Learning. You may have heard of it.

It’ll be the end of times. It’ll be the start of humanity. It’ll know when I want to buy more dog food. These are comments you’ve heard from your relatives or even comments you’ve asked yourself. If you’re in an IT role, it may have usurped your other favorite question: “Can you setup my WiFi?”

Yes, machine learning is a big topic and is contested by folks like Stephen Hawking and Ray Kurzweil. But it isn’t all gloom/doom, eternal life, and confused grandparents. No, most of the time, machine learning techniques are just used to get a handle on datasets that are more massive than malicious.

xcodebuild exit code 65:

These four words frighten iOS and macOS developers with any CI system experience. Some of you might even have seen it while using Xcode itself but weren’t aware since Xcode hides those error codes from you.

In order to prevent xcodebuild from just returning that exit code without any kind of error message, we have to understand what exit code 65 actually refers to.

If you type man xcodebuild into your terminal emulator of choice and scroll to (almost) the bottom, you’ll see this little paragraph just before the usage examples:

Think back to your last one-on-one with your manager.

Did you go for a stroll about town? Did you get coffee? Do you get coffee every single time you have a one-on-one? I hope not, that’s a lot of coffee. It probably made you jittery, didn’t it? Made it hard for you to form words that make sense.

You had a perfect argument for a new tool or process, but it died young on your tongue because of the toxic levels of caffeine coursing through your veins. Yes, sometimes words can be hard. And soft, too. Actually, words come in a variety of textures, and that is the beauty of language.

Xcode Continuous Integration

Over the past few months, we’ve been evaluating ways to make macOS builds faster and more reliable. As of today, all macOS builds are running on a new, more powerful fleet of VMs with double the amount of CPU and RAM. For many customers, build times have dropped by up to 30%, with 60% fewer Xcode failures.

All macOS builds have been automatically upgraded to the new, more powerful VMs. We’ve been testing this with customers over the past few weeks, and the results have been promising.

At the end of April 2017, Ubuntu 12.04 will no longer be supported by Canonical. Additionally, CircleCI are not updating the 12.04 build image with new versions of packages.

We encourage all customers to upgrade to our 14.04 build image, or even better, sign up for our 2.0 platform for complete control and flexibility over your build images.

We have designed CircleCI 2.0 to provide faster build performance and give users greater control over their environments. Users have full control over their customized build environments and do not have to worry about build environments being updated without your knowledge or becoming out of date.

We utilize the power of Docker to provide our users the flexibility of creating customized environments. Users can preinstall dependencies/tools in custom Docker images, so that you can have the exact versions and releases you want in your images.