CircleCI NewsLast Updated May 13, 20249 min read

CircleCI product updates

VP, Product

Every few months, the CircleCI product organization is going to round up some of the cool stuff we’ve created for you. Read on to learn about the new security, productivity, and speed features you can take advantage of.

May 2024

Last I counted there were over a hundred product updates made to CircleCI between February to April, spanning onboarding to AI to release orchestration and more. That’s a lot! Read on for the new security, productivity, and velocity feature highlights you can take advantage of in CircleCI.

Productivity

Customers appreciate the leading troubleshooting experience that CircleCI provides. Now all customers can use SSH Rerun and auto cancel redundant workflows, including integrations via GitLab or GitHub app.

CircleCI Releases is now GA, with easier ways to get started from within the UI! Thank you to all the customers who provided feedback in the open preview stage, there are many more enhancements to look forward to in the coming months.

We’re on a mission to make CircleCI the tool of choice for builders of LLM-based apps, and now the Eval Orb is available to easily integrate LLM evaluations into your CircleCI pipelines. Also, you’ll notice an “Ask AI” button added to the left nav bar in app that allows you to enter a question and query it against CircleCI Docs to provide an answer.

We’ve rolled out a few items in open preview that you can start playing around with, the Usage API allows all CircleCI customers to view their usage (both metadata and credit consumption). A much-requested feature we’re eager to get feedback on is now in open preview - you can now test-run your config from VS Code. Also now in open preview, we’re making it easier than ever to switch any of your projects to CircleCI with the Config translator to ease migration from GitHub Actions and GitLab CI to CircleCI.

Have you tried out a new open preview feature? Email feedback@circleci.com and tell us what you think.

Security

Starting with an update for CircleCI administrators, groups management now allows you to easily group users and assign access to specific projects. We’ve added additional granularity for contexts with expression restriction that lets you restrict based on pipeline values such as branch and SSH rerun. Another contexts-related change currently in open preview: you can now store OpenAI credentials as CircleCI contexts, available in project settings under “advanced settings”.

Moving to Server, large config file compile time is faster and more reliable than ever. The added granularity of contexts mentioned above with expression restriction is also available on Server. Bringing the benefits of our cloud offering to Server, Customers can now use OIDC in jobs and securely debug failed jobs in real time with SSH rerun on container runner. Also, the latest revision now supports Kubernetes 1.29.

Finally, the latest self-hosted runner release has reduced the long term memory footprint of container runner. Users can retry tasks when the pod has failed to startup due to pod set up errors and improved monitoring for active task pods.

Velocity

All customers should notice an improvement to our config compilation time. Internally we’ve seen up to 40% improvement in compilation time. For Mac resources, more capacity has been added to reduce pipeline queue time during peak traffic. Also Windows medium and large resource classes have been upgraded to be more performant.

A full list of product changes is always available on our changelog, and we’ve justed added a changelog button to the left nav in the app!

The whole R&D team at CircleCI is really proud of this momentum and the performance improvements that these updates bring to our customers. You can check out the CircleCI product roadmap for what’s coming next.

Till next time, we’ll keep shipping!

Here’s a more detailed list of additional product changes from the last few months.

Additional product changes

Productivity:

GA of our Release agent feature
Get a list of all branches for a specified project: getAllInsightsBranches API returns org-id and project-id
For GitHub App triggers, branches with “tags” in the name are identified as “push” commits
CMD + Click on a job now opens the job in a new window
Launching a project in GitHub App accounts is easier than ever with HTTPS Checkout.
We made it easier for projects connected with GitHub App and GitLab to easily debug their builds by launching SSH Rerun.
Customers can now easily translate configs from other tools to CircleCI using our new config translator
Customers now get automated refill notifications
“Unauthorized job” error message for users unauthorized in a context. These jobs will no longer be clickable
Enabled org joiners to link VCS during onboarding
Entire jobs row on the pipelines page is now clickable
Improved detection of outlier metrics in Insights
GitHub App and GitLab connected organizations can easily rename their organizations
Specify custom config source and edit config source in project settings for accounts integrated with GitHub App
Projects from GitHub public vs. private repositories clearly labeled
UI improvements across every aspect of the product experience

Security:

We introduced dynamic controls over contexts with the release of Expression Based Contexts.
Groups UI error notification - Customers attempting to access a deleted or invalid group in the UI now see a 404 page with the opportunity to go back to where they came from.
Disabled “delete security group” for non-org admins
In the Group UI member list, customers can now click on a user’s name in the group members list to see that user’s people page.
Config policies now compatible with the latest version of Open Policy agent
Open AI context section added to product settings
Three new environment variables added: CIRCLE_PROJECT_ID, CIRCLE_ORGANIZATION_ID, and CIRCLE_PIPELINE_ID
Ability to disable SSH rerun when no SSH keys present

Velocity:

Faster artifact upload with parallelized file upload
Improved large config compilation time by up to 40%
New Windows 2019 server image update
New AWS elastic container registry (ECR orb) future proofed to work with all new image updates
New Pipeline trigger parameters to improve responsiveness of the API

Feb 2024

In this first edition, we’re excited to share the changes we think you’ll find most delightful. From security, to productivity and velocity, check out what’s launched and a sneak peek at what’s upcoming!

Security

Whether you use Cloud, Server or self-hosted runner, you’ll see enhancements this quarter. In our Server 4x release, the experience is now significantly more stable and cost-effective to run thanks to the new execution architecture. Config Policies are now fully supported on Server with the 4.3 release, allowing admins to govern their project configurations and specific conditions to allow for pipelines to trigger.

For anyone that uses self-hosted runners, machine runner 3.0 now has more uniform logs and metrics, and simplified setup and maintenance by offering convenient packages that allow you to easily integrate with your preferred cloud templating tool, withfaster feature enhancements to come.

All new plan types will now be able to set up user groups. This means admins can define specific permissions for their team, rather than depend on the inherited permissions from their version control system (VCS).

Productivity

Inbound webhook triggers allow teams to trigger a build based on a change to any source, not just from the VCS but also Docker Hub, Datadog, npm packaging registry and more. For example, you can now listen to every time a Docker image you rely on is updated so you can automate the testing/validation of that image without lifting a finger. This feature, now in open preview, means teams can be more productive and more aware of changes that might impact their work.

Our blog has a great article on a use case for this functionality to optimize MLOps pipelines, and you can read more in the docs.

Customers love the simplicity of using orbs. You can now deploy models using the Amazon SageMaker orb or use the updated Slack orb.

Velocity

Exciting news for our Scale plan customers, you now have access to three new GPU resource classes! CircleCI is the CI/CD of choice for building AI-enabled applications, with these new resources, users have noticed a 75% reduction in build times. Also in support of AI/ML building, our Linux CUDA images have been updated with AI/ML-specific software. Last but not least, anyone who uses the checkout command to check out code will notice a speed improvement.

We look forward to sharing big and small improvements that are in the works next time! If you want to stay in the know on what’s coming up for CircleCI, you can check out our Product Roadmap, or the announcements on CircleCI Discuss.

Here’s a longer list of product changes in the last few months:

Security: