Continuous Delivery

CircleCI Extends Orbs Ecosystem for CI/CD

CircleCI announced today it has added integrations in collaboration with 20 partners to the family of connectors, known as Orbs, that it makes available for its continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform.

Thomas Trahan, vice president of business development for CircleCI, said integrations are now available with Heroku, AWS, Cloud Foundry, Google Cloud, Red Hat, Helm, Kublr, Alcide, Azure, DeployHub, Fairwinds, VMware, Kubernetes, Rafay Systems, Pulumi, Convox, Spinnaker, realMethods, Quali, Pantheon, LaunchDarkly and Salesforce.

Since launching Orbs a year ago, CircleCI claims there are now more than 13,000 organizations using Orbs across nearly 40,000 repositories and 9 million CI/CD pipelines. There are also more than 1,200 Orbs provided by more than 116 partners listed in the CircleCI registry. In the future, Trahan said the company plans to begin surfacing recommendations concerning which Orbs to employ based on the nature of the workflow being constructed.

Trahan said Orbs are gaining traction because they reduce the amount of custom code that needs to be written to set up workflows across a CI/CD pipeline. Without the existence of Orbs, DevOps teams are forced to rely on application programming interfaces (APIs) that are more liable to break, he said.

Competition between CI/CD platform providers is expected to become fiercer as adoption of CI/CD platforms continues to accelerate. A report published by Data Bridge Market Research this week forecasts demand for continuous integration (CI) tools alone will grow to $18.9 billion by 2025, representing a 19% compound annual growth rate. While the current CI/CD market is dominated by open source platforms managed by internal DevOps teams, CircleCI is betting interest in accessing a managed CI/CD service delivered via the cloud will rise as organizations opt to devote more resources to building applications versus managing the platforms they are built on.

A recent CircleCI study of more than 30 million workflows spanning 1.6 million jobs runs per day on its platform found 80% of all workflows finish in less than 10 minutes. Those jobs spanned 150,000 projects launched by more than 40,000 organizations.

The report noted 50% of those organizations start six workflows per day across their projects and that 50% of CircleCI projects never had a failure during pipeline changes made over the 90-day period when the study was conducted. When a failure did occur, 50% recovered in less than an hour, with 25% of organizations recovering in 15 minutes or less, according to the report.
As organizations embrace best DevOps practices more broadly, CircleCI is betting these kinds of metrics will become more important as a platform differentiator.

Naturally, it’s too early to say how the CI/CD platform wars will play out in the months and years ahead. But the amount of code organizations will need to deliver at increasingly faster rates is only increasing. The challenge organizations are facing now is finding a way to deliver all that code at an unprecedented level of scale.

Mike Vizard

Mike Vizard

Mike Vizard is a seasoned IT journalist with over 25 years of experience. He also contributed to IT Business Edge, Channel Insider, Baseline and a variety of other IT titles. Previously, Vizard was the editorial director for Ziff-Davis Enterprise as well as Editor-in-Chief for CRN and InfoWorld.

Recent Posts

Valkey is Rapidly Overtaking Redis

Redis is taking it in the chops, as both maintainers and customers move to the Valkey Redis fork.

13 hours ago

GitLab Adds AI Chat Interface to Increase DevOps Productivity

GitLab Duo Chat is a natural language interface which helps generate code, create tests and access code summarizations.

18 hours ago

The Role of AI in Securing Software and Data Supply Chains

Expect attacks on the open source software supply chain to accelerate, with attackers automating attacks in common open source software…

23 hours ago

Exploring Low/No-Code Platforms, GenAI, Copilots and Code Generators

The emergence of low/no-code platforms is challenging traditional notions of coding expertise. Gone are the days when coding was an…

2 days ago

Datadog DevSecOps Report Shines Spotlight on Java Security Issues

Datadog today published a State of DevSecOps report that finds 90% of Java services running in a production environment are…

3 days ago

OpenSSF warns of Open Source Social Engineering Threats

Linux dodged a bullet. If the XZ exploit had gone undiscovered for only a few more weeks, millions of Linux…

3 days ago