Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

July 2021

Continuous integration for Rust applications

Rust is a powerful language built on the promise of performance and reliability. With no runtime or garbage collector, it easily runs in any environment and can be integrated into any existing language or framework. With the advent of WebAssembly . Rust has become even more valued in the web development space. Rust’s seamless peering with Node.js to build highly performant functionalities has made it a delight for web developers.

Automate your releases with CircleCI and the GitHub CLI orb

Last year, GitHub announced the release of their new CLI tool . The new gh CLI wraps around the standard git cli and offers a suite of additional GitHub.com specific commands. These new commands include the ability to create a new pull request and to create a release directly from your terminal. We here on the CircleCI Community and Partner Engineering team at CircleCI use the gh pr checkout command all the time to safely test pull requests from the community (you!) on our various orbs .

Bring Xray Out of the Box with Dependency and Binary Scanning

Shifting left security means you, the developer, catching and fixing vulnerabilities and license violations early in the SDLC. That’s why Xray scans binaries pushed to Artifactory by your builds, and alerts you when there are issues with your dependencies. But catching them earlier, even before checking in code, can be important for developers shifting left.

CircleCI Server 3.1 Demo | Server Metrics, Backup & Restore plus Runners

Learn how to use server metrics, backup and restore, and CircleCI runners on server 3.1. The latest version of server is designed to meet the strictest security, compliance, and regulatory restraints. This self-hosted solution offers the ability to scale under load and run multiple services at once, all within a team's Kubernetes cluster and network with the full CircleCI cloud experience.

How to sell your manager on CI/CD

Continuous integration seems like a smart choice, right? Why would anyone think that integrating your code into the product as soon as possible is a bad idea? Let me take you back to August 2000, when a fresh-faced young engineer was starting her first engineering role. She was given a desk, a computer, and a detailed project plan that included a release date three months in the future.

How to Use Cargo Repositories in Artifactory

For five years running, Rust has taken the top spot in Stackoverflow’s survey of most loved programming languages. Seen by many as the next step after C/C++, the language is fast becoming embraced by embedded device developers and as a robust system for IoT. At JFrog, we took notice and are eager to welcome Rust developers to the empowerment of robust binaries management and how it contributes to continuous integration.

JFrog detects malicious PyPI packages stealing credit cards and injecting code

Software package repositories are becoming a popular target for supply chain attacks. Recently, there has been news about malware attacks on popular repositories like npm, PyPI, and RubyGems. Developers are blindly trusting repositories and installing packages from these sources, assuming they are secure.

JFrog and Vdoo: Better Together

JFrog customers will soon enjoy end-to-end, holistic security across their software lifecycle — from development to devices — as the technology of recently-acquired Vdoo gets integrated into the JFrog DevOps Platform. That was the pledge made by JFrog and Vdoo leaders during their first joint webinar, in which they explained why JFrog acquired Vdoo, how the platform’s security and compliance capabilities will expand, and what’s the integration timeline.

Monitor your CI pipelines and tests with Datadog CI Visibility

Datadog CI Visibility, now available in beta, provides critical visibility into your organization’s CI/CD workflows. CI Visibility complements Datadog’s turn-key CI provider integrations and the integration of synthetic tests in CI pipelines to give you deep insight into key pipeline metrics and help you identify issues with your builds and testing.

How Converting to YAML Build Pipelines Can Help Engineering Teams Be More Efficient

Engineering teams can only be as efficient as the processes they employ during development. The need for increased efficiency is why software development has shifted from the “waterfall” approach to a more responsive, agile methodology. In an agile development environment, quality software can be delivered consistently to suit the ever-changing needs of stakeholders and end users.

Clojure microservices for JavaScript developers part 2

This series was co-written by Musa Barighzaai and Tyler Sullberg. In the previous post, we explored high-level differences between thinking in Clojure compared to thinking in JavaScript. We are now ready to start building our first Clojure microservice. The microservice we are going to build will be very simple. It will be an HTTP server that uses a Redis data store to count how many times a given IP address has pinged the /counter endpoint.

Clojure microservices for JavaScript developers part 3

This series was co-written by Tyler Sullberg and Musa Barighzaai. This is the third and final post in a series of posts for JavaScript developers about how to set up Clojure microservices. The previous posts were: Those previous posts are useful context, but you can clone the repo and jump into this post without reading them.

"Accelerate" your team with Sleuth

The larger your team grows and the faster your teams move, the harder it is for engineering leaders to find trust but verify moments, the moments where you should dig in and make sure your team's health is improving. Imagine a world where all your engineering tools are working together such that accurate and insightful trust but verify moments come to you. Imagine a world where you have the finest Sleuth in the world, working just for you.

Clojure microservices for JavaScript developers

This series was co-written by Tyler Sullberg and Musa Barighzaai. CircleCI is growing, which is wonderful. However, one of the growth challenges we have is that our backend is primarily written in Clojure, and few developers know Clojure. Many CircleCI engineers, including myself, have learned Clojure on the job. Before joining CircleCI, I was a JavaScript developer. As the lingua franca of software engineers, JavaScript is a relatively straightforward language to learn.

The Confident Commit ep. 7 | Design Your Org Structure for Fast Flow of Change with Matthew Skelton

Rob interviews co-author of Team Topologies and founder of Conflux, Matthew Skelton on how to structure your team for a fast flow of change. Discover the signs, symptoms, and proper metrics that indicate your organization's structure may need a redesign.

Knative - deploy, and manage modern container-based serverless workloads - Elad Hirsch

Yalla! DevOps 2021 -- The first, in-person DevOps conference of the year! Driven by the DevOps community. All about the DevOps community. Knative is the new kid in town in the Serverless community. As Kubernetes is de facto our cloud infrastructure Knative is allowing us to focus more on our business logic and less on infrastructure ,All while committing to the new paradigm of Serverless computing.

Vdoo & JFrog - Enhanced Security From Code To The Edge

Join this webinar to learn more about JFrog’s announced acquisition of Vdoo! Together JFrog and Vdoo are the creators of a hybrid product security platform that automates multidimensional security tasks throughout the entire build and release cycle - and how JFrog and Vdoo plan to integrate their technologies to further the secure Liquid Software vision. Imagine if you had access to streamlined, consolidated and comprehensive security data in one platform that helped developers and security teams identify and fix their most critical issues rapidly.

The Peopleware Running Cloud DevOps

Early this year, we set out on a journey to onboard a new cloud engineering team at JFrog. Many can relate to the challenges involved with onboarding a new team, these were amplified even more during the pandemic. However this blog post is not about COVID-19, it is about sharing our experience of fine-tuning the onboarding path for this unbeatable group. TL/DR: What it takes to build and onboard a team of junior engineers into the existing JFrog Cloud engineering team.

How to Accelerate Software Delivery with Hybrid Cloud CI/CD

Are you looking for solutions to deliver rapid application development and iterations? You’re not alone. To accomplish this, many organizations are embracing cloud native containers across multiple cloud providers. The reason? This strategy reduces the risk of vendor lock-in, and helps you scale the application infrastructure horizontally.

Modern Tech Stacks need Multi-Format Repositories

At Cloudsmith, using Multi-tenant repositories, we provide a simple and flexible solution to deploy and distribute your software artifacts. Multi-tenant repositories allow you to store artifacts of different formats in the same place. Organize your packages by environment, project, package type, or whatever way you see fit- we are not opinionated about how you organize your packages or containers.

Modern Tech Stacks need Multi-Format Repositories

At Cloudsmith, using Multi-format repositories, we provide a simple and flexible solution to deploy and distribute your software artifacts. Multi-format repositories allow you to store artifacts of different formats in the same place. Organize your packages by environment, project, package type, or whatever way you see fit- we are not opinionated about how you organize your packages or containers.

Tips for Choosing the Right CI/CD Tools

CI/CD enables DevOps teams to go from development to production while tackling unexpected glitches. But, choosing the right CI/CD tool is always a challenge. In this blog, we have covered the tips that will help you select the right CI/CD tool for your team. A few years ago, it was nearly impossible to find a software development shop that wasn't deploying their code using some sort of Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) tool.

Engineering solutions to security issues

Software engineering teams have always looked for ways to increase code creation efficiency, reduce code vulnerabilities, and improve security processes. Many are now shifting security left, establishing security controls and testing — specifically integration testing — at an earlier phase in the software development lifecycle (SDLC).

Managing reusable pipeline configuration with object parameters

CircleCI pipelines are defined in configuration files using the YAML syntax, which has been widely adopted by many software tools and solutions. YAML is a human-readable declarative data structure commonly used in configuration files and in applications where data is being stored or transmitted. The data in pipeline configuration files specifies and controls how workflows and jobs are executed when triggered on the platform.

DORA Metrics Explained: the four DORA metrics and how to improve them

DORA metrics come from an organization called DevOps Research and Assessment. This was a team put together by Google to survey thousands of development teams across multiple industries, to try to understand what makes a high performing team different than a low performing team. What they ended up settling on are these four metrics.

GitOps Feature Release

It’s no secret that the software development community is starting to embrace GitOps. With the complexity of engineering modern software today, it is becoming a necessity for many companies to reassess their software development and delivery practices. When Codefresh first released GitOps 2.0 late last year, we had already planned to make it a core pillar of our platform.

Codefresh GitOps Controller

The new Codefresh GitOps dashboard gives you the perfect overview of your deployments and how they change over time. This powerful view combines information from multiple sources such as your Kubernetes services, Git Pull Requests, and JIRA issues. To help you incorporate all of this helpful information into your deployments, we have introduced the GitOps controller, a handy agent that is installed in your cluster and collects critical information about your GitOps deployments.

GitOps Current State Dashboard

At Codefresh, we are fortunate to hear from customers of all sizes and nearly every industry. A common interest is visibility into deployments and their respective environments. As a company filled with software enthusiasts and developers, this strongly resonates with our culture and our passion for empowering developers. Visibility has been an area of continuous improvement for Codefresh and something we are committed to being the best at.

Codefresh GitOps App of Apps

Microservices are powerful, but it isn’t a secret that they come with many challenges. Codefresh is acutely aware of this as we built our platform on microservices. We know what it means to maintain a fast-moving and complex software service that must remain highly available. One of the most common challenges we deal with is maintaining complex relationships at deployment time among individual microservices.

Creating an Azure DevOps CI CD pipeline for AKS

In this hands-on webinar we will learn to set up a CI/CD pipeline to deploy your apps on a Kubernetes cluster with Azure DevOps. Our leading cloud architect Itay Malka, with almost a decade of experience, will illustrate how you can easily set up a CI/CD pipeline and accelerate your DevOps journey with containers.

Become a CI/CD expert with live DevOps training courses

At CircleCI, we’ve worked hard to build on-demand training to help our users get the most out of our platform and its capabilities. Historically, we created CircleCI Academy courses to ensure that all our customers know how to effectively use the features on our platform. Today, we’re taking a proactive approach to enhance your DevOps skills.

Unlimited Preview Environments with Kubernetes Namespaces

In our big series of Kubernetes anti-patterns, we briefly explained that static test environments are no longer needed if you are using Kubernetes. They are expensive, hard to maintain, and hard to clean up. Instead, we suggested the adoption of temporary environments that are created on demand when a pull request is opened. In this article, we will see the practical explanations on how to achieve unlimited temporary environments using Kubernetes namespaces.

Influencing DevOps without Authority - How a DevOps Engineer can advance real DevOps

In this talk, Baruch will show how some proven influencing and negotiating techniques can be used to convince critical stakeholders in your organization in the necessity of DevOps. We look at the arguments, the techniques, and the small tricks, which work in particular situations with particular engineering and business leadership positions and will prepare you to deliver the message of DevOps most convincingly to each.

Encountering some turbulence on Bitbucket's journey to a new platform

The past week has been a turbulent time for Bitbucket Cloud's engineering and support teams as well as our customers. Some of you have expressed concern regarding our services’ performance and reliability in recent days. Fortunately, for the majority of Bitbucket users, our services have continued to perform smoothly. But given the number of developers who use Bitbucket daily, even a small percentage of our active users represents a lot of people.

How Slack Transformed Their CI With Tracing

Slack experienced meteoric growth between 2017 and 2020—but that level of growth came with growing pains. In his talk at the 2021 o11ycon+hnycon, Frank Chen (LinkedIn), a Slack Senior Staff Engineer, detailed one of Slack’s biggest pain points in that period: flaky tests. A flaky test returns both a passing and failing result despite no changes in the code. At one point, between 2017 and 2020, Slack’s flaky test rate reached as high as 50%.

CI/CD Pipeline: A Quick Guide

Fast and reliable build pipelines are crucial to the success of modern day engineering teams. Check out this quick guide that can help DevOps/SRE teams to streamline the integration of development and testing processes through CI/CD tools. All software companies are committed to providing services that are useful, appreciated, and shared. Therefore, it all boils down to delivering reliable software to users and consumers.

JFrog And Red Hat DevSecOps Security Series

Accurately detecting and mitigating security vulnerabilities is critical for any enterprise. JFrog’s ongoing collaboration with Red Hat provides the DevOps community with enterprise-grade DevSecOps capabilities, enabling you to deliver high-quality, and more secure software, anywhere. As part of the Red Hat DevSecOps Security Series, Join us on July 1st for JFrog & Red Hat’s perspective on application analysis and how JFrog’s recently achieved Vulnerability Scanner Certification helps identify vulnerabilities in applications, images and configurations early in your lifecycle.

The Confident Commit | Episode 6: Architecture meets delivery with Chris Richardson

Rob interviews Chris Richardson on how engineering metrics can help teams evaluate the effectiveness of their architecture. The two discuss how a team's architecture can enable or inhibit their ability to make changes quickly and confidently. How do you balance rapid delivery and finding product-market fit with getting to a stable, workable system over time? Tune in today!

Intercept Security Scans with Vulnerability Webhooks

Security scanning provides an opportunity to target, track, and trace vulnerabilities introduced to your packages as soon as Cloudsmith has received a complete package upload. However what happens when you want to intercept the results of a scan immediately. An early warning can make a difference when distributing vulnerable packages to hundreds, thousands, or even millions of developers, devices, or systems globally.

Why Path-to-Production Analysis Is a Must for Software Development Teams

One of the key metrics IT leaders care about is the total time it takes for a release to go from development to being live in production. The metric used to measure that duration is called the “release lead time.” It can range from days to months, depending on factors such as team agility, enterprise constraints, and interdependencies.