CircleCI Blog

By Collins Wekesa
Mar 26, 2019
CI/CD for Node.js projects: using CircleCI, Kubernetes, and Docker with deployment to the Google Cloud Platform

Photo credit: Meshstudio

Automating the delivery of software can solve many of the problems associated with manual deployments. The goal of this post is to provide insight into continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) for Node.js projects. The tutorial will feature the use of several tools: Docker to help us in containerization, Kubernetes will be used as our orchestration tool, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) will be the cloud service provider, and finally, CircleCI.

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- engineering
By Nathan Dintenfass
Mar 20, 2019
A preview of pipelines

TL;DR: Today we are changing our project setting called “Build Processing” to “Pipelines.” If you want to know why, read on. If not, nothing about this will affect you for a while, so you can stop here.

The change to “pipelines” begins our process of moving all projects over to having this setting on by default. This is the first of several changes we’ll be making to roll out the concept of pipelines throughout our platform. The vast majority of users should not notice any change because of today’s update, but we wanted to share more detail on what we are doing, and why, so you have more context on things that will be coming in the future.

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- engineering
- news
By Chris Howe-Jones
Mar 19, 2019
Package a Clojure web application using Docker

This is the second blog post in a three-part series about building, testing, and deploying a Clojure web application. You can find the first post here.

In this post, we will be focusing on how to add a production database (PostgreSQL, in this instance) to an application, how to package the application as a Docker instance, and how to run the application and the database inside Docker. To follow along, I would recommend going through the first post and following the steps to create the app. Otherwise, you can get the source by forking this repository and checking out the master branch. If you choose this method, you will also need to set up your CircleCI account as described in the first post.

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- engineering
By Tracy Ragan
Mar 15, 2019
Start deploying using the CircleCI deployment Orb with DeployHub
“But, we already use scripts for deployments.”

We hear that a lot. So let’s explain why you would choose an automation tool over scripts. The main arguments are packaging and versioning. DeployHub uses an application to package together components. Applications and components have versions. Because of DeployHub’s versioning capability, you can do incremental deployments, moving away from the old-style monolithic approach. If you are just updating a .jar or .war file, you can always just copy the new file over. We agree. A script can do that, but an application is more than just a binary, and a deployment is more than just a copy. With DeployHub you can include in your package as a deployment:
- Database updates
- Environment variables
- Binaries
- Microservices
- Infrastructure changes
Continue reading “Start deploying using the CircleCI deployment Orb with DeployHub”
By Sachin Agarwal
Mar 13, 2019
LaunchDarkly feature flags in your CircleCI builds

Organizations that utilize CircleCI to power their continuous integration and delivery understand the benefits of deploying early and often: reduced risk, fewer conflicts, and faster value for customers. Pairing CI/CD with feature flags allows modern development teams and organizations to write and ship code at their own pace while still ensuring that customers and users get the best possible experience.

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By Gillian BenAry
Mar 12, 2019
Leading open source ML advancements: an introduction to PyTorch

PyTorch is an open source deep learning platform created by Facebook’s AI research group. Like NumPy, PyTorch is a library for tensor operations but adds support for GPU and other hardware acceleration and efficient tools for AI researchers to explore different domains. While it started out as a Python-based successor to the Lua Torch framework, PyTorch has expanded in scope to be not just a research platform but also a deployment platform.

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- engineering
- open-source
By Michelle Luna
Mar 8, 2019
CircleCI welcomes our newest ERG, CircleSHEi

Happy International Women’s Day and Women’s History Month from everyone at CircleCI! We recently launched a framework for employee resource groups (ERGs) to serve the richly diverse interests within our organization. Today we want to share our newest ERG, CircleSHEi, tell you about how this group came together, and share some notes from the kickoff mixer we enjoyed together this week.

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- culture
- engineering
By Lena Reinhard
Mar 7, 2019
We’re growing CircleCI’s engineering teams in Europe; join us!

At CircleCI, we’ve always been committed to hiring the best people where we find them. From the start, we’ve been a distributed engineering team and we pride ourselves on continuing to be globally distributed. Our engineers are now spread between San Francisco and Tokyo, across 4 continents, and with three oceans and 17 hours time difference between them. We’re planning to grow our engineering organization even further this year, and decided to focus a large part of our expansion in one region specifically: Europe.

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- news
By Rose Kaplan-Bomberg
Mar 5, 2019
Creating automated build, test, and deploy workflows for orbs, part 2

In my last post, I discussed how to set up an ideal, automated CI/CD process for a new orb. The goals of this process are version control, multiple levels of testing, and automated deployment. Now, let’s walk through an example. I’ll use our Azure CLI orb, published just last month, as it is small and simple enough to be fairly easily understood, yet also a bit complex, as it does integrate with Microsoft Azure, a third-party cloud provider.

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By Justin Cowperthwaite
Feb 28, 2019
7 steps to building an engineering competency matrix

Every engineer deserves a clear growth path so they can understand, plan, and execute on meaningful career growth. Providing a framework for this growth (we call ours a competency matrix; it’s also known as a career ladder, or professional development ladder) is important work, and the responsibility of any organization that wants to nurture and grow its employees.

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- culture
- engineering