March 1, 2020, was a Sunday. I was getting ready for a work trip to San Francisco. Just before heading to the Berlin airport, I checked my phone. There was a text from my boss: Hey Lena, trying all channels. Don’t fly. I didn’t fly that day and I haven’t flown since. Two days later, as planned, I went from interim to permanent VP of Product Engineering at CircleCI. At the same time, Europe was going into lockdown, then the world went into lockdown.

With the new Contexts API release, developers can save their team valuable time while enhancing security practices. We know maintaining your organization’s security is crucial. There is the need to meet strict compliance guidelines, such as FedRAMP and GDPR, and what seems to be an increasing number of breaches, like the compromise of over 150,000 video security cameras as a result of a targeted Jenkins server.

Server 3.x, which is now available to all CircleCI customers, was designed to meet the strictest security, compliance, and regulatory restraints. This self-hosted solution can scale under heavy workloads, all within your team’s Kubernetes cluster on your private network, but with the dynamically scaling cloud experience of CircleCI. Offering an exceptional on-premise service means keeping that service up-to-date with the latest releases.

Most applications begin with a small to medium-sized user base. Even with migration projects, you would not immediately open your new application to the entire existing user base. Instead, you would first test with some internal users, then open up to early adopters. Nevertheless, if your application is successful, at some point you will face the need to scale it. Nevertheless, if your application is successful, at some point you will face the need to scale it.