Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

March 2022

Scheduling load tests and persisting output with k6

In this k6 series I have covered HTTP request testing with k6 and performance testing with k6. I designed these tutorials to introduce you to k6 and to show you how to use k6 for performance testing of microservices. As the third tutorial in the k6 series, this will cover how you can store your k6 test results locally and also how to schedule your load tests using CircleCI’s scheduled pipelines feature.

How Lightspeed optimized iOS test runs with parallelism and caching

At Lightspeed, we maintain multiple large iOS projects as well as their modularized dependencies. The last year of acquisitions brought together many different approaches to CI/CD at our company. I recently led the initiative to bring these projects and practices into alignment. In this post, I will explain the goals we had for our continuous integration pipeline and the implementations we used to achieve them.

Config best practices: concurrency and parallelism

When is the last time you updated your CI/CD workflow? A year ago? Never? You are not alone, my friends. Reconfiguring workflows can be one of the most daunting tasks for DevOps practitioners. But with new opportunities to benefit from CircleCI plans, there’s one simple and effective place to start: understanding concurrency and parallelism. Using concurrency and parallelism can cut your build times significantly. But you need to know what they are and how to find them in your config file.

Top 5 CI/CD best practices

For engineering teams, CI/CD is the key to improving their development cycles. CircleCI is committed to helping our customers optimize their pipelines to streamline delivery to production. If your team values speeding your time to market, commit to trying these 5 best practices. These are CircleCI’s recommendations for cutting your development cycle times and improving your CI/CD processes in general.

Practical Tips & Tricks For Securing Your CI/CD Pipelines

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 and deployment. In this workshop, we will cover security mechanisms you can employ in your CI/CD pipelines to tighten security while enabling developers to push their code, quickly and safely.

Benefits of scheduling continuous integration pipelines

Scheduling is an integral part of software development practices. Tools for scheduling jobs help development teams save time by scheduling recurring tasks — like modifying a database or sending out periodic emails — for execution at specified times. There are many to choose from, including cron for Linux, scheduled tasks for Windows, launchd for macOS, Jobber, and anacron.

CI/CD Benchmarks for High Performing Teams in 2022

Software delivery has never been more critical to the success of business in every industry. It’s also never been more complex. With the growing challenges of complexity, how can engineering teams succeed? CircleCI examined 55 million data points from more than 44,000 organizations and 160,000 projects to help guide team development and software delivery decisions. Benchmarks from the report show that the highest performing teams prioritize being in a state of deploy-readiness, deploy more often and recover faster.

Build an automated invoice generator application

As a software engineer and technical content creator, I work with a lot of companies on many different contracts. To get paid for my work, most companies require that I send an invoice. Sometimes they want one daily, at the end of the week, or even when the project has been completed. Sending an invoice to my clients is crucial because it determines when and if I will get paid on time. If this sounds like a repetitive task that can eat deep into my productive hours, you are right.

Schedule database backups for MongoDB in a Node.js application

Database backup protects your data by creating a copy of your database locally, or remotely on a backup server. This operation is often performed manually by database administrators. Like every other human-dependent activity, it is susceptible to errors and requires lots of time. Regularly scheduled backups go a long way to safeguarding your customers’ details in the case of operating system failure or security breach.

Docker's genius shift: How one decision set the course for success ft. Justin Cormack

Docker CTO Justin Cormack joins Rob Zuber to discuss how Docker moved from very few paid users among millions of others to their current level of success. In this episode, Cormack shares the paths Docker took to transform its massive user base into a sustainable business model. Hint: sometimes product-market fit might be right in front of you. Have a topic you want to discuss? Reach out to us on Twitter @circleci!

Observability versus monitoring in software development

To supervise the behavior of distributed applications and track the origin of service failures and downtime, developers often use traditional monitoring technologies and tools. However, this approach can fall short in its ability to measure the overall health of modern cloud-native architectures, which can span multiple hosting environments and encompass hundreds of microservices.

Continuous integration for Angular applications

Automated testing is the foundation of your continuous integration practice. Automated testing clarifies the status of build processes for your team’s applications, ensures that tests run on every commit or pull request, and guarantees that you can make quick bug fixes before deploying to the production environment. In this tutorial, I will show you how to automate the testing of an Angular application.

Automate the deployment of Angular apps to Firebase

Developers use JavaScript frameworks like Angular, React, and Vue.js to build every kind of single page application, from simple to complex. By separating JavaScript and CSS, frameworks let dev teams structure applications in modular chunks of code that carry out a single function. That is great, but once your application is ready for deployment to production, you will need a command to compile and bundle the separate files into a single one.

Discover 2022 DevOps trends with CircleCI data report

If you’re like many of our customers, the phrase software supply chain entered your lexicon this year. You’ve begun to feel the complexities and vulnerabilities of that supply chain. You’ve connected the dots between more reliable software delivery and business success. You’re recognizing the gains developer efficiency can have on profitability.

Predict the cost of IP ranges with new enhancements to the Resources tab

One of our most requested and popular features, IP ranges for the Docker executor, recently became available to all customers on a Performance or Scale plan. With IP ranges, you can route job traffic through an IP address that is verifiably associated with CircleCI. This enables your team to meet compliance requirements by limiting the connections that communicate with your infrastructure. With any new feature, you want to know how much it’s going to cost your team.

CircleCI acquires test intelligence platform Ponicode

Today we are pleased to announce that CircleCI has acquired Ponicode, a Paris-based AI engine for analyzing source code, with the goal to help developers produce better code in their local development environment. Ponicode caught our attention with their dedicated focus to helping developers handle their least favorite tasks — the toil surrounding writing code — such as authoring tests, commenting code, analyzing code quality, and more.

Troubleshooting CircleCI webhooks

CircleCI webhooks open up a variety of exciting use cases, from data logging and integrations with third-party monitoring and observability solutions to setting up your own custom dashboards to monitor pipeline health. To ensure that you can properly monitor events, resolve authentication errors, and also access the information contained within them, you need a reliable process to debug any errors you might encounter.

You don't need to migrate from Jenkins. Start building beside it.

Ten years ago, tools like Jenkins were first-class automation platforms for your CI pipelines. The jump from lower-level tools and custom scripts to tools like Jenkins created dramatic improvements. Now, a new generation of web-based tools are available. They provide a platform for the next leap forward for product build automation. This long history means that many mature organizations use Jenkins for CI.

Automating database cleanup with scheduled pipelines

RESTful API projects often require that developers grant temporary access to a particular resource. Sometimes this happens within a specific interval, such as a few days or months. Revoking permissions when they expire could mean including extra logic during the authentication process or writing a middleware function to attach to the secured endpoint. Or, this logic could be abstracted to a separate part and configured to check and manage permissions at a regular interval.