CircleCI wrapped: 2024 in review

By Aakar Shroff

Our teams spent 2024 focusing on allowing you maximum flexibility in how you do work on CircleCI. It’s hardly an exaggeration to say that for every customer on CircleCI, there is a unique way to configure and run a pipeline – and that’s a good thing! From VCS-triggered events and filters to different places that config can live and what can be done with it, to new and expanded options for resources classes… you wanted increased flexibility, and in 2024, we delivered.

In that spirit, we want to take a moment to share some key features designed to bring you even more power and value. We launched Releases, an integrated platform to manage, modify, and monitor software deploys, helping you push changes faster and with more control than ever. We also created custom webhooks, letting you set triggers in the way that best suits your team, and enabling fine-tuned control over your workflows. We also expanded GitHub apps features for OAuth, ensuring smoother integrations and tighter security. The release of the CircleCI Eval orb (reusable package of YAML configuration) broke new ground for developers working on testing AI-based applications. The launch of the Usage API has redefined visibility, helping customers track usage data, allowing more control of resource management and cost. Finally, our introduction of expression-based contexts made workflow execution more flexible than ever before, enabling new variables in your pipeline to control access to shared resources.

Each release we have brought to our community over this past year has been shaped by our continued dedication to maximize productivity, efficiency, and control in your software delivery.

Want more? Here are some highlights from 2024:

Dev experience

• We decreased load times on the Pipelines page significantly (30%-100%), benefitting customers who were experiencing slow loading due to running higher numbers of projects (~20+ pipelines with 15+ jobs per workflow).
• By merging our frontends into a single repository, we can deliver new features more quickly and efficiently and continue to improve accessibility.

Payments and billing

• We transitioned to Stripe, to bring you a notably robust and reliable payment provider. This transition enabled us to provide you with flexible plan options - ability to pay past due bills and seamlessly toggle between month-to-month and prepaid billing, without any requirement for support assistance.

Data reliability

• We improved how we manage databases, adding blue-green deployments to drastically reduce customer downtime when making updates.
• We built a historical database to allow faster access to data, to improve the customer experience wherever we display customer build information (Insights, jobs, pipelines, or other metrics).

Resource classes

• We added HTTPS Checkout to improve the ease of use on setup for GitHub App integrations.
• We shipped M2 Pro resource classes: M2 Pro Large and M2 Pro Medium. These releases offer a sizeable performance boost over 1st generation M1 Mac mini hardware.
• We moved the Mac fleet to a new architecture that will allow us to scale faster to meet customer demand.
• We improved the speed and reliability of Xcode image distribution: new versions of Xcode now become available faster.

Identity management

• We released user groups that introduce more granular controls for project-level permissions. Available for orgs connected to GitHub App, Gitlab, and BitBucket Data Center.
• We released SSO, supporting identity providers like Okta and Ping Identity for standalone organizations who want to control CircleCI access from a central location.
• We now allow SSH reruns for standalone users. Users can store their public SSH keys inside CircleCI (in authentication-service), allowing SSH reruns to work for customers who are a part of an organization that uses CircleCI’s GitHub App, Bitbucket Data Center, or GitLab integrations.
• We made some architectural changes to our authentication and authorization services to make validating access faster for customers.
• As part of that, we have increased the reliability, scalability, and serviceability of those services to allow us to add new features and functionality to our access and authorization services.

Server and runners

• We significantly increased the performance, resilience, and reliability of self-hosted runner container jobs, allowing customers to use their infrastructure and resources better for CircleCI jobs.
• Server components now run rootless, reducing the vulnerability surface area of the various components that run in-server.
• Server now includes high-value security features such as OIDC, and config policies.
• We enabled customers to directly update to the latest version of server (4.7) from any version since 4.3, providing a clear path for customers to be running the most recent version.

Configuration

• We are now able to add new config syntax and capabilities quickly and safely. That enabled us to do things like flexible requires, when statements for jobs, and parameterized filters. These additions allow customers to optimize pipelines and workflows for speed and cost.
• Config compilation time was reduced by 4x, solving timeout issues for complex configurations. This decreases time to feedback for customers and reduces failed pipelines run.
• We optimized how we compute workflow statuses, improving API latency by 3x, which improves user experience on Insights, the API v2, and the UI.

Platform reliability

• We’ve continued to invest in scalability and reliability improvements, and thanks to these investments, we maintained uptime above our target.
• Automated Rollbacks: Using analysis templates, we can now automatically revert deployments with increased error rates, enabling faster detection and resolution of issues.
• Synthetic testing: We prioritized synthetic tests, particularly for integrations across different sources of change, ensuring accurate data flow and downstream execution for customer needs.

We have had a record year of building software (and according to our data, you have too). From our team to yours, we thank you for trusting us to be a part of your engineering organization this year. We look forward to working with you to help you and your team deliver even better in 2025.