Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

April 2021

Guide to using Docker for your CI/CD pipelines

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.

How to build a CI/CD pipeline with Docker

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.

Accelerating DevOps Using Cloud Native Technologies With AWS, Docker & JFrog

In this webinar we help you gain a deeper understanding of the benefits of migrating and modernizing applications from a monolithic architecture to microservices, in order to accelerate DevOps processes. We outline the efforts required to reach this stage of sophistication in application development and deployment.

How NOT to take a side project to startup - Dev Matters S1E03

What side projects make terrible startups? What should you avoid when trying to make the transition? In this episode of Dev Matters, Don and his guest Dylan Etkin discuss side projects and lessons learned taking Sleuth from a side project to a startup. This episode was recorded in front of a live studio audience on Twitch.

Extinguishing our performance fires and rebuilding for the future

I stepped into the role of Head of Engineering for Bitbucket Cloud in late 2020, having served as one of the team's senior engineering managers for several years. It is an honor and a privilege to lead this team, and I couldn't be prouder of the hard work we've done and continue to do each day to make Bitbucket a world-class product empowering teams to build, test, and deploy software to millions of people around the world. It has been an eventful journey, and the past few weeks are no exception.

JFrog Expands APAC Presence To Support Growing DevOps Adoption

At JFrog, we’ve seen DevOps and DevSecOps adoption growing robustly in Asia-Pacific (APAC), as the region’s large enterprises recognize the competitive advantage and importance of DevOps and digital transformation. In fact, by 2025, up to 25% of Asia’s 500 largest companies will become software producers to digitally transform and maintain their A500 status, IDC predicts1.

Building CI/CD pipelines using dynamic config

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.

Introducing dynamic config via setup workflows

With the new release of dynamic config via setup workflows, CircleCI customers can now use jobs and workflows, not only to execute work but to determine the work they want to run. We built dynamic config because we know our users want more dynamism in the CircleCI build process. Historically, our platform has been very deterministic: the config is pre-set in a file based on the revision for a given pipeline.

Atlassian Open DevOps and Codefresh

Codefresh is excited to partner with Atlassian on their new Open DevOps launch. Codefresh is offering native support for connecting the two platforms and giving better visibility on deployments and features of each deployment for our mutual customers. At the heart of this integration is the Codefresh App; which can be found on the Atlassian Marketplace. Simply define Codefresh as the CI/CD partner that will connect to Atlassian’s DevOps API.

Integrate security into development with Snyk, now a seamless part of Bitbucket Cloud

While PR analysis within Code Insights and Snyk Pipes are available to use right now, we're rolling out a native Security tab in Bitbucket Cloud. This will be a gradual rollout through the month of May so watch out for it in the left nav. We look forward to your feedback. Even small vulnerabilities can cost a team a lot. All too frequently we see news reports of organisations that mishandled their code & build level security, causing customer data to be exposed.

JFrog and PagerDuty Extend Ecosystem Integration

JFrog and PagerDuty have deepened their technology integration to further boost IT operators’ and developers’ visibility into the software development lifecycle and accelerate incident resolution. The latest integration, which involves the JFrog Pipelines DevOps pipeline automation solution, simplifies and streamlines how to identify faulty builds that impact production environments.

How to deploy an application on Friday

No one likes giving their weekends up to fix release issues. Developers and operations teams are traditionally hesitant to make changes or deploy applications on a Friday, in case something goes wrong and they have to spend their weekend making emergency fixes. Or worse, trying to roll back changes that were made. However, with a strong set of practices and a reliable deployment pipeline, there should be no reason why a deployment cannot happen anytime — even on a Friday afternoon.

GitOps Use Cases You May Not Have Considered

GitOps is growing in popularity. You’ve probably seen it mentioned on Reddit or dev.to. But what the heck is GitOps? Broadly speaking, GitOps takes the principles of Git and CI-powered workflows favored by software developers — commonly used to automate the process of building, testing and deploying software — and applies them to other business processes.

Integrating a Cloudsmith repository with a Harness CD pipeline

In this blog, we will walk through the process of configuring a private Cloudsmith repository as an artifact source for a Harness Continuous Deployment pipeline. Harness is a Continuous Deployment platform that allows you to easily automate the deployment of your software to your infrastructure and environments.

Featured Post

How should start-ups court software talent?

There is a game of 'speed dating' going on between technology businesses and the software engineering talent that bring amazing solutions to market. In recent years big tech companies, expanding aggressively in Europe, have competed ferociously with locally headquartered tech startups for the best software engineers. These engineers are in short supply. A government-supported Tech Nation report disclosed that 10 per cent of all UK job vacancies were in tech. The report suggested that at current growth there could be 100,000 job openings per month before the end of June this year.

CI/CD Pipeline Security 101

In our previous post, we discussed the recent security incident at Codecov and the following investigation at Mattermost. As a follow-up to that we wanted to share some of the basic design principles as well as a handful of more technical tips and tricks around CI/CD pipeline security that helped Mattermost come out of the incident unscathed.

Collision 2021 - Securing Software Pipelines with Continuous Packaging

Building automation and security into software supply chains requires packaging source code, dependencies and containers into logical, versioned units. But, in 2021, how engineers package their software is more vital than ever, requiring a serious refresh with a name befitting its focus on security within the cloud. We call it Continuous Packaging. Now on-demand, watch our talk from Collision Conference 2021 where we explored Continuous Packaging and how it can help secure your delivery pipelines, from development through to deployment.

Trigger a Codefresh Pipeline from ArgoCD

Codefresh is an awesome platform for doing GitOps deployments to Kubernetes. Starting last year, the Codefresh team has been adding rich integrations with Argo CD and Argo Rollouts, GitOps observability dashboards, and more. Codefresh pipelines, in particular, have played an integral role in our customers’ progressive delivery workflows by allowing them to orchestrate all of the testing, analysis, and rollback activities that work in conjunction with Argo CD synchronization.

Connect Civo Kubernetes to Codefresh

Codefresh is a DevOps automation platform with Kubernetes and Docker native tools and features. You can create powerful pipelines and utilize the provided dashboards by connecting different Kubernetes clusters and registries to receive further insights into your deployments. Additionally, by enabling GitOps for your repositories you can reach the highest level of confidence in your Kubernetes deployments.

JFrog Artifactory Terraform Provider Gains Xray Functionality

A few months ago, I was asked if I wanted to develop an open-source Terraform provider. Eleanor Saitta, principal at Systems Structure Ltd, had a client who was setting up JFrog Xray across their Github repositories but didn’t want to configure each repository by hand. As an SRE who enjoys working on projects that automate away those sorts of pain points (and someone who works extensively with Terraform during their day job), this sounded like an interesting project to work on.

Sleuth + SOC 2 Type II: Our constant commitment to security

‍In Sleuth’s continuing efforts to help our customers to deliver faster and safer, we have always put security as a top-level business priority. Security and privacy of our customers’ data is always in the forefront of our design, development, and deployment concerns. We understand the level of trust our customers put in us when they connect key systems together with Sleuth.

Recover automatically from failed deployments with Argo Rollouts and Prometheus metrics

Argo Rollouts is a progressive delivery controller created for Kubernetes. It allows you to deploy your application with minimal/zero downtime by adopting a gradual way of deploying instead of taking an “all at once” approach. Argo Rollouts supercharges your Kubernetes cluster and in addition to the rolling updates you can now do In the previous article, we have seen blue/green deployments.

3D-printed, Sleuth logo UNBOXING

Andy, a regular viewer of Don's dev-focused Twitch streams, created a 3D-printed, 100 LED RGB Sleuth logo, and this is its unboxing. Don and Andy also get it working, connected to the internet, then Don extends his Twitch chat bot to allow viewers to change the logo's lights. The stream finishes with Don hooking the logo up to Twitch follow events so that when a viewer starts following, the logo lights up. This video is a lightly edited from the original Twitch stream. Huge thanks to Andy for building and sharing such a cool project!

Automatically Assess and Remediate the SolarWinds Hack

With software supply chain attacks on the rise, are you wondering how you can recover quickly from the recent SolarWinds breach at your company? Months after its discovery, the devastating SolarWinds hack remains a top concern for business, government and IT leaders. This destructive supply chain attack put the spotlight on software development security — a critical issue for the DevOps community.

Continuous integration that you can trust: announcing SOC 2 certification

At CircleCI, we care about security - in 2018, we became the first CI/CD tool to meet the rigorous security and privacy standards required by government agencies to get FedRAMP authorized. Now, CircleCI is SOC 2 certified, adding another industry-recognized security accreditation.

What is YAML? A Beginner's Guide

YAML is a digestible data serialization language that is often utilized to create configuration files and works in concurrence with any programming language. YAML is a data serialization language designed for human interaction. It’s a strict superset of JSON, another data serialization language. But because it’s a strict superset, it can do everything that JSON can and more.

Can devs and designers get along? - Dev Matters S1E02

In this episode of Dev Matters, Don and his guest Ben Sanders discuss whether software developers and designers can really get along. Ben shares stories, tips, and strategies pulled from his experience of over 15 years in the software industry. This episode was recorded in front of a live studio audience on Twitch.

IDC: Become a Digital Innovation Factory with These 4 Pillars of Modern DevOps

It’s do or die. In today’s brutally competitive digital economy, it is imperative for organizations to transform themselves into software-driven businesses — becoming “digital innovation factories” that can quickly and efficiently create and distribute new digital services. This enables them to be resilient, nimble, and innovative, creating business value and responding to market shifts and to customer needs. What does it take to keep your digital innovation factory humming?

Adding IaC security scans to your CI pipeline

The adoption of Infrastructure as Code(IaC) has skyrocketed in recent years as engineers seek ways to deploy cloud infrastructure faster and more efficiently. IaC refers to the technologies and processes that manage and provision infrastructure using machine-readable languages (code) as opposed to inefficient manual operations.

Deploying infrastructure with an approval job using Terraform

If you are looking for an Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tool, Terraform probably tops your list. In this tutorial, you will learn how to automate the deployment of changes to your infrastructure using Terraform and CircleCI workflows. The workflows will use Approval Jobs. For this project, we will deploy the infrastructure we build to Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

3 Ways for Administrators to Scale DevOps Projects | JFrog

With the global pandemic transforming the majority of customer interactions and transactions to operate in a contactless world, software development has accelerated to address the market shift towards digital businesses. For many enterprises managing this increase in volume and velocity of development projects has added stress to their processes and workforce.

Using Modern DevOps Practices to Become a Digital Innovation Factory

Today, it is imperative for businesses to transform themselves into digital innovation factories with the agility to quickly and efficiently create and distribute new digital products and services. In this webinar, guest speakers from IDC will share key insights, market data, and best practices around the four strategic pillars for establishing a digital innovation culture as well as the modern DevOps methods and tools required to support these practices.

Looking back at almost a decade of DevOps and forward to what's coming next

TL;DR: This year’s State of DevOps Report is the 10th anniversary edition of this annual research on how practitioners are making DevOps work for them. Whether you’re a big time CircleCI user or are just beginning your career, we want to hear from you. Please take the survey so your voice is represented in the 2021 State of DevOps.