Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

The internal DevOps team at JFrog needed to provision cloud resources, create environments, and manage infrastructure for our developers. Unfortunately, it involved wasting a significant amount of time on repetitive tasks, that was slowing down the pace of innovation and taking away our developers’ focus from building new features and industry leading products.

In our post, 9 Continuous Delivery Tools For Reliable Releases, we explored why continuous delivery is critical to building robust development pipelines — and how it helps teams deliver customer value while boosting the bottom line. Today, we’re diving into the next evolution of that pipeline: continuous deployment. Today’s technology companies need to release quality features quickly and put them in users’ hands even quicker.

Containers have been with us for a while and are ubiquitous in the Secure Software Development Life Cycle (SSDLC). According to some reports, nearly 60% of organizations use containers for most or all of their production applications. It’s no surprise really, as containers provide consistency and standardization across the lifecycle while speeding up delivery pipelines. They revolutionized how we develop and deploy apps in the cloud and there is no sign of this changing anytime soon.

Most CircleCI pipelines are configured to trigger automatically on code commits, but not every development scenario fits that model. Sometimes you need to trigger a build manually—to test pipeline changes, retry a flaky test, or run CI on a colleague’s branch—without the friction of pushing empty commits or navigating to the UI to manually trigger a build.

In a single pipeline, it’s easy to control job order. But in a large engineering org with dozens of pipelines, hundreds of contributors, and countless shared environments and services, that control can start to slip. Pipelines interfere with each other. Deploys overlap. Test environments break. Someone merges code, triggers a build, and gets a failure they can’t reproduce. Unfortunately, this kind of instability is a routine byproduct of scale.