CircleCI Blog

Modern Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines are designed to consume, manipulate, and update data from external services/platforms. An example of this would be an application test that requires data from a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) service to verify that the data output formats are valid for consumption by the application. Since the CRM is a service hosted externally, the CI/CD job will need a mechanism to access the data. REST API calls are excellent for these types of situations.

In this blog post, we will discuss REST APIs and some of the reasons for integrating them into your CI/CD pipelines.

Go v1.11 was released August 24th, 2018. There were quite a few changes! While there are several changes that I really enjoy, such as the ability to assign nested variables, there are also changes that affect your CircleCI build.

When Dollar Shave Club began using CircleCI, they found it improved not just their CI/CD pipeline, but their production monitoring and release management operations as well, while making their developers’ lives easier. They came to us wanting to share the story of their transition to CI and how using CircleCI has helped them improve developer experience while increasing the quality of their software and their speed of delivery. Read on for their story.

Don’t repeat yourself is a well-known principle of software development. Wikipedia defines it as follows: “Every piece of knowledge must have a single, unambiguous, authoritative representation within a system.” In this post, I will focus on how this principle relates to your CI suite and explore areas where we can eliminate duplication. Let’s discuss what pitfalls appear in a typical situation and how we can avoid them.

We recently sat down with Jez Humble, Founder and CTO at DevOps Research and Assessment, DevOps thought leader, and author of some of the foundational books on delivering software at scale. Jez and his co-authors Nicole Forsgren and Gene Kim just recently published their latest book, Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations. Read on to learn about the book Jez says predicts DevOps culture in the 60s, why cynicism on teams is a sign of burnout, and how to drive change slowly through organizations.

Today we’re proud to announce the opening of our Boston office, our second US presence outside of our headquarters in San Francisco. While we’ve been a distributed company since the very beginning and had many team members all across the world, putting down roots on the East Coast marks an important moment in our growth, and we couldn’t be happier to be joining Boston’s thriving technology community.

I recently gave a talk at DockerCon and it was focused on showing the audience how to implement a CI/CD pipeline into their codebase with very little effort. In this post I’ll walk through the demo code and CircleCI config that I used in my talk and demonstrate how to implement CI/CD pipelines into your code base.

This post will cover:

• A simple unit test for a Python flask application
• How to implement a CI/CD pipeline in the codebase using a CircleCI config file in the project
• Building a Docker image
• Pushing the Docker image to Docker Hub
• Kicking off a deployment script which will run the application in Docker container on a Digital Ocean server

The ultimate goal of building and testing software is generally to deploy that software. The official CircleCI blog and many community blogs showcase examples on deploying to Kubernetes clusters, pushing to Docker registries, uploading to AWS S3, and even new serverless techniques. However, for solo developers or even small companies, using large deployment platforms like these is not always practical.

But there are other options.

In this blog post we’re going to cover a few ways to deploy your software to traditional Virtual Private Servers (VPS) such as those provided by Linode, DigitalOcean, or Vultr.

DevOps has been the latest in a long succession of problem-solving processes that each come with a digital garage full of tools: CI/CD systems, testing frameworks, monitoring tools, and security audit tools to name a few. Which of these tools do you need? Which will solve the problems, pains, and slowdowns your organization faces?

On July 19, CircleCI faced a sitewide outage which left thousands of teams unable to test and deploy builds for the better part of a day. This outage affected the productivity of many development teams, and surely caused a few missed deadlines. We value the trust our customers place in us and are deeply sorry for the effect this had on their work. For those interested, we want to give more details as to what happened, why it happened, and what we’re doing about it.