Virtual machines (VM) offer great flexibility for hosting web applications. A developer/engineer is able to configure and control every piece of software and every setting that the application needs to run. Azure, one of the largest cloud hosting platforms, has virtual machine offerings for both Linux and Windows-based operating systems. In this tutorial, you will learn how to set up a continuous deployment pipeline to deploy a Node.js application to an Azure virtual machine.

Today we announced our Series F round of $100M led by Greenspring Associates, with Eleven Prime, IVP, Sapphire Ventures, Top Tier Capital Partners, Baseline Ventures, Threshold, Scale, Owl Rock, and Next Equity Partners. Thank you to our customers, community, partners, investors, and team. This latest investment allows us to invest as well; in our product, our community, and in our people. We build for the builders of the digital age: developers.

We are proud to announce that CircleCI has acquired Vamp, the first cloud-native release orchestration platform. This paves the way for CircleCI customers to have first-class release orchestration and continuous validation, all natively within the CircleCI platform.

Software development is changing rapidly. On one hand, you must quickly adapt to evolving requirements, while on the other, your applications need to operate continuously without downtime. DevOps helps you quickly adapt to changes. Among other initiatives, continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) are intgegral to any DevOps practice.

SQL injection is one of the most destructive ways an application can be attacked. This kind of attack is targeted toward the application database, which can result in consequences that are irreversible, lead to loss of money, and reduce user trust in your company. There are far too many application data breaches happening every day, usually when a malicious agent attacks the database.

Docker is a platform for developers and sysadmins to develop, deploy, and run applications using containers. Docker is also referred to as an application packaging tool. This means that enabled applications can be configured and packaged into a Docker image that can be used to spawn Docker containers that run instances of the application. It provides many benefits including runtime environment isolation, consistency via code, and portability.

I talk with many of my fellow engineers at conferences and other events throughout the year. One thing I like demonstrating is how they can implement a continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipeline into a codebase with very little effort. In this post I will walk through some demo code and the CircleCI config that I use in the demonstration. Following these steps will show you how to implement CI/CD pipelines into your code base.

Creating robust, manageable, and reusable functionality is a big part of my job as a CI/CD engineer. Recently, I wrote about managing reusable pipeline configuration by adopting and implementing pipeline variables within pipeline configuration files. As I showed in that tutorial, pipeline variables and orbs have added some flexibility to this process, but they are still a bit limited.