CircleCI has launched new features and integrations to improve security and automation practices for today’s software developers. The new self-hosted container manager is designed to provide more flexibility and security to help developers ease the burden of infrastructure management with better traceability.
Today, developers face a new set of challenges, including growing concerns about internal and external threats and lack of team bandwidth. In fact, Gartner predicts that by 2025, 45% of organizations worldwide will have experienced attacks in their software supply chains, a threefold increase from 2021.
In an effort to provide better software security, many developer teams have moved to cloud-hosted CI because it provides a flexible and scalable centralization platform for building and testing software in the most common environments. .
However, developer teams also face security and compliance requirements or specialized compute needs that prevent them from performing certain tasks on the public cloud.
CircleCI’s self-hosted runners extend its CI engine to any infrastructure or security use case, allowing enterprise teams or those in highly regulated industries to choose their own infrastructure to run tasks, to have more control over their environments, to build and test on a wider variety of architectures, and more.
“CircleCI’s goal has always been to help developers build great things and get them to market faster,” said Jim RoseCEO, CircleCI.
“Our new self-hosted container carrier leverages automation as a silver bullet so customers can deploy with confidence without sacrificing power or cost effectiveness,” Rose continued.
Key benefits of CircleCI’s new self-hosted container manager include:
- Freedom of choice: CircleCI’s self-hosted runner portfolio offers teams the ability to self-host the infrastructure for their CI/CD pipelines while leveraging the functionality of CircleCI Cloud.
- Extended simplicity of the CircleCI Cloud Docker runtime: Teams can specify Docker images for CI/CD jobs with a line in their configuration.
- Reduced work with ephemeral Kubernetes pods: Teams can integrate with Kubernetes APIs to scale up and down ephemeral pods that each run CI/CD tasks, providing an enhanced level of scaling by design.
“The ephemeral nature of containers can allow DevOps teams to scale up and down work as needed to meet demand, reduce costs, and optimize their use of self-hosted runners. Solutions, such as the CircleCI self-hosted container manager, can also reduce labor by giving teams more control without the hassle of administrative overhead,” said Jim MercerVP of Research at IDC DevOps and DevSecOps Solutions.
Founded in 2011, CircleCI has always been at the forefront of software development. As a CI/CD platform serving thousands of enterprises worldwide, CircleCI enables its customers to realize their ideas, at scale, by refining the software development process from start to finish through a variety of offerings in the cloud, or behind a company’s firewall via a fleet of self-hosted CircleCI runners.
CircleCI is the CI/CD provider that offers the flexibility to specify any Kubernetes settings as opposed to pre-chosen configurations.
Additional infrastructure management integrations within the CircleCI ecosystem
Customers have access to thousands of CircleCI Orbs through the CircleCI Technology Partner Program, launched in November 2018. CircleCI Orbs bundle CircleCI configuration into reusable packages that allow users to perform thousands of use without the need for a complex configuration.
The functionality, flexibility, and control provided by these orbs make CircleCI the fastest, most reliable path to success.
Some of the most popular integrations that aim to make infrastructure management faster and easier include:
- Orb CircleCI Kubernetes: A collection of tools for teams working with Kubernetes.
- CircleCI AWS-EKS Orb: Enables teams to automate deployments on AWS.
- Orb CircleCI Docker: Allows teams to install, configure and use Docker in any CircleCI task.
CircleCI will also add new integration with New Relic CodeStream, a platform that makes observability accessible where developers live, in their IDE. This integration aims to increase the ability of teams to collaborate, visualize and observe CI/CD data with more context.
“Today’s developer teams need the ability to collaborate and understand context in deeper and more meaningful ways. That’s why we’ve partnered with CircleCI to deploy the new CircleCI-CodeStream integration that allows teams to visualize their CI/CD data in a way that speeds issue resolution without compromising business agility,” said Pierre Pezarisco-founder and former CEO of CodeStream, and senior vice president of strategy and experience at New Relic.