Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

February 2022

Technical debt: how to measure and manage it with DevOps

Every technical team in the software industry is familiar with technical debt. That is because every software team incurs technical debt along the way. This article answers some critical questions about technical debt. It reviews what technical debt is and what its causes are, why it is essential to address technical debt, and how this debt accumulates.

Advanced pipeline orchestration with the circleback pattern

With multiple teams working on many projects, having a single pipeline for your software is just not enough. These projects need to be built and integrated before they can be tested and released. So how do dev teams handle this situation? Many teams approach the problem by breaking down software into smaller parts that do less, and are easier to maintain and build. This approach has resulted in the microservices architectures that are increasingly common in our industry.

Deploying a React application to Netlify

React, a front-end framework for building user interfaces, uses component-based architecture and non-opinionated design principles, making it a developer favorite. React has been widely adopted and has a large community of developers behind it. Netlify is a popular framework for hosting React applications, but it does not provide your team with the highest level of control over the deployment process. As a result, you are not able to perform important tasks like running automated tests.

How to secure your CI pipeline

Many enterprises still struggle to get security right. To protect their business, it is critical they focus on security during the entire infrastructure and application lifecycle, including continuous integration (CI). Developers are becoming more autonomous as they transition to a DevOps way of working, with more people requiring access to production systems.

Dedicated hosts for macOS are now available

Dedicated hosts for macOS are now available on CircleCI. This new layer of support is built exclusively for macOS and offers Apple developers unprecedented storage, security, and scalability on CircleCI. By reserving a dedicated host, teams can unlock access to a bare metal instance that provides exclusive access to an entire host machine for 24 hours.

Adding value to applications using the software testing life cycle

Software testing is important enough to have its own phase in the software development life cycle (SDLC). The software testing life cycle (STLC) is a step-by-step process that improves the quality of software by applying rigorous planning and analysis to the testing process. Testing is a development tool that adds value to your team’s applications. Embracing testing as a vital component of software development can save you and your team a lot of time debugging and fixing errors in the future.

Manage automated test data with the PractiTest orb

The software testing data provided by CI/CD tools is valuable, but it is not always comprehensive enough to give managers the insights they need to make improvements. To make effective business decisions, managers need visibility into the entire testing process, in a way that will help them understand what needs to be done and how.

Using authentication decorators in Flask

Has your team worked on an API and wanted (somehow) to implement more powerful security features? If you are dissatisfied with the level of security in an API, there are solutions for improving it! In this tutorial, I will lead you through the process of creating API endpoints that are secured with authentication tokens. Using these endpoints, we will be able to make requests to the Flask API only for authenticated users.

Optimize your resource classes with the CircleCI resources dashboard

CircleCI cloud offers over 20 resource classes (varying CPU and RAM) across multiple execution environments. Finding the best resource class size for your job — not too big and not too small — can sometimes be a challenge. But now, you can view CPU and RAM usage for Docker executors within the UI. The new dashboard, found in the new Resources tab on the job details page, displays the CPU and RAM, for all parallel runs in your Docker job.

Let's talk engineering; building software by building community

For the past three years, I have been running and facilitating a community where folks from all levels and departments at CircleCI can come together to discuss diverse topics. We call it “Let’s Talk Engineering.” Some of the topics we’ve covered have been technical in nature, while others have focused more on leadership: how different teams operate, personal growth, and writing to name a few. Let’s Talk Engineering celebrates interdisciplinarity and multidisciplinarity.