CircleCI today launched a developer hub as part of an effort to further advance adoption of DevOps best practices.
Company CEO Jim Rose said CircleCI developer hub provides access to a set of resources for optimizing continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines. In many cases prior to the onslaught of the COVID-19 pandemic, organizations had only partially implemented best DevOps practices, noted Rose. The CircleCI developer hub will make it easier for those DevOps teams to extend the scope of those processes while serving to educate IT teams that have had limited exposure to DevOps workflows, he said.
The CircleCI developer hub provides access to, among other things, CI/CD configuration optimizations and pre-built packages, migration guides and documentation. There are also reusable snippets of CircleCI configuration code, customized open source Docker images that can be used on any platform, and command-line interfaces (CLIs) and application programming interfaces (APIs).
Later phases of the developer hub will include an orb development kit to help users quickly create new orbs using CircleCI CLI commands. An orb is a software development kit (SDK) that simplifies integrating the CircleCI CI/CD platform with third-party tools and platforms. CircleCI also plans to provide a much more streamlined search engine experience for CircleCI documentation.
The CircleCI developer hub was built in part using $100 million in additional funding the company raised earlier this year. Overall, CircleCI claims it processes nearly 2 million jobs across 100,000 projects per day.
In general, Rose said DevOps is becoming more challenging as organizations attempt to orchestrate the building and deployment of monolithic and microservices-based applications constructed using container and serverless computing frameworks. There are plenty of instances in which deploying a monolithic application is still more appropriate, so IT organizations need to be able to create DevOps workflows capable of spanning multiple classes of frameworks and platforms, he noted.
Making matters more complex is the testing of microservices now needs to be integrated within production environments, added Rose. It’s not really possible to completely test a microservices until IT organizations see what impact it might have on other microservices that have already been deployed in a production environment, said Rose.
It’s not clear what impact COVID-19 has had on the productivity of DevOps teams. It might be easier for developers to generate more code working from home than in the office. However, generating quality code at the right time during a project requires a lot more orchestration when members of the application development team are highly distributed. More than a few organizations either already have or soon will be tuning DevOps workflows to align with the so-called new normal.
Of course, there are plenty of places to find tips and advice when it comes to building and extending DevOps workflows. The challenge is creating workflows that are not only flexible and resilient but also simple to implement and maintain.
