DEVOPSdigest

CircleCI announced new features and integrations to enhance security and automation practices for today’s software developers.

The new self-hosted container runner is designed to provide more flexibility and security to help developers ease the burden of infrastructure management with greater traceability.

In an effort to provide better software security, many developer teams have moved to cloud-hosted CI because it offers a flexible and scalable centralization platform to build and test software in the most common environments. However, developer teams are also challenged with security and compliance requirements or specialized compute needs that prevent them from running certain jobs on the public cloud.

CircleCI’s self-hosted runners extend its powerful CI engine to any unique infrastructure or security use case, allowing enterprise teams or those in highly regulated industries the ability to choose their own infrastructure for running jobs, have more control over their environments, build and test on a wider variety of architectures, and more.

“The goal at CircleCI has always been to help developers build great things and deliver to market faster,” said Jim Rose, CEO, CircleCI. “Our new self-hosted container runner leverages automation as a silver bullet so that customers can deploy with confidence without sacrificing power or cost efficiency.”

Key benefits of CircleCI’s new self-hosted container runner include:

- Freedom of choice: CircleCI's self-hosted runner portfolio provides teams the ability to self-host the infrastructure for their CI/CD pipelines while leveraging the robust features of CircleCI Cloud.

- Extended simplicity of CircleCI Cloud’s Docker execution environment: Teams can specify Docker images for CI/CD jobs with one line in their configuration.

- Reduced toil with ephemeral Kubernetes pods: Teams can integrate with Kubernetes APIs to spin up and down ephemeral pods that each execute CI/CD jobs, providing an enhanced level of scaling by design.

"The ephemeral nature of containers can enable DevOps teams to scale work up and down as needed to meet demand, reduce cost, and optimize their use of self-hosted runners. Solutions, such as the CircleCI self-hosted container runner, can also reduce toil by providing teams with more control without the hassle of administrative overhead," said Jim Mercer, Research Vice President of IDC DevOps, and DevSecOps Solutions.

Customers have access to thousands of CircleCI orbs through CircleCI’s Technology Partner Program, which launched in November 2018. CircleCI orbs bundle CircleCI configuration into reusable packages that enable users to perform thousands of out-of-the-box use cases without the need for complex configuration. The functionality, flexibility, and control that these orbs provide make CircleCI the fastest and most reliable route to achieve success.

Some of the most popular integrations that aim to speed and increase ease of infrastructure management include:

- CircleCI Kubernetes orb: A collection of tools for teams working with Kubernetes.

- CircleCI AWS-EKS orb: Allows teams to automate deployments on AWS.

- CircleCI Docker orb: Allows teams to easily and quickly install, configure, and use Docker in any CircleCI job.

CircleCI will also add a new integration with New Relic CodeStream, a platform that makes observability accessible where developers live—in their IDE. This integration aims to increase teams’ ability to collaborate, visualize, and observe CI/CD data with more context.