Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Your continuous integration (CI) pipelines are at the core of the change management process for your applications. When set up correctly, the CI pipeline can automate many manual tasks to ensure that your application and the environments it runs in are consistent and repeatable. This pipeline can be an integral part of your security strategy if you use it to scan applications, containers, and infrastructure configuration for vulnerabilities.

Bringing a new tool into an organization is no small task. Adopting a CI/CD tool, or any other tool should follow a period of research, analysis and alignment within your organization. In my last post, I explained how the precursor to any successful tool adoption is about people: alignment on purpose, getting some “before” metrics to support your assessment, and setting expectations appropriately.

The CircleCI API provides a gateway for developers to retrieve detailed information about their pipelines, projects, and workflows, including which users are triggering the pipelines. This gives developers great control over their CI/CD process by supplying endpoints that can be called to fetch information and trigger processes remotely from the user’s applications or automation systems.

Being able to track and aggregate data by region is important when monitoring your application. It can provide visibility into where errors and latency might be occurring, where security threats might be originating, and more. Now, you can use Datadog geomaps to visualize data on a color-coded world map. This helps you understand geographic patterns at a glance, including where users are experiencing outages, app revenue by country, or if a surge in requests is coming from one particular location.

Most of you are familiar with the roles and profiles method of writing and classifying Puppet code. However, the roles and profiles method doesn’t have to exist only in your control repository. In fact, as I’ve been developing Puppet code centered around compliance, I’ve found that adapting the roles and profiles method into a design pattern to Puppet modules makes the code more auditable, reusable, and maintainable!

CircleCI has released a new feature called CircleCI runner. The runner feature augments and extends the CircleCI platform capabilities and enables developers to diversify their build/workload environments. Diversifying build environments satisfies some of the specific edge cases mentioned in our CircleCI runner announcement.

If you've been familiar with FireHydrant previously, you've probably started to notice some strange things going on with the FireHydrant brand over the past several months. New pages? New content? New messaging? New colors? Yes, your eyes do not deceive you, we've been making some changes!