Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

January 2022

IP ranges - better security for more confidence

Today, we’re announcing that one of our most popular feature requests, IP ranges, is now generally available for CircleCI Cloud customers. This feature enables teams to meet compliance requirements by limiting the connections that communicate with their infrastructure. No company wants to give the entire internet access to their artifact repositories or other sensitive environments. With IP ranges, teams are able to open up their IP-based firewalls to only CircleCI.

Running regular security scans with scheduled pipelines

Security is a vital part of application development, yet it may be neglected until an attacker takes advantage of a vulnerability in the system. The consequences of a security breach can damage an application’s integrity as well as a company’s reputation and revenue. Software architects and engineers need to pay special attention to securing the systems they work on.

Practical Tips & Tricks for Speeding Up Your CI/CD Pipelines

When developing software and maintaining CI/CD and testing pipelines we are often compelled to increase our test coverage by adding more tests, and therefore improve our apps’ quality. After all, more automation equals better software, right? There’s a flipside to this equation however, and a point at which we start seeing diminishing returns from each test we add. Taken to extreme, these diminishing returns begin to actively harm our ability to deliver working software.

API performance testing with k6

Performance testing measures how well systems perform when subjected to various workloads. The key qualities being tested are stability and responsiveness. Performance testing shows the robustness and reliability of systems in general, along with the specific potential breaking points. In this tutorial, you will use k6 to do load testing on a simple API hosted on the Heroku platform. Then you will learn how to interpret the results obtained from the tests.

Testing locally with CircleCI runners

Many development teams start their CI/CD journey with a local build box (or six) that run their tests. In several mobile teams I worked on, for example, we had a few Mac Mini boxes with physical devices plugged in that we used for running local UI and unit tests. Eventually we migrated to a cloud-based solution, which brought us much greater stability and many new features. But moving to the cloud also meant our local hardware was obsolete.

Build private CircleCI orbs on any organization

Using CircleCI’s orbs is a great way to share CI/CD configuration across projects. Public orbs work well for wide adoption, but private orbs have been helpful for organizations needing to share common internal configuration in a secure, non-public way. Private orbs work only within the organization that publishes them. We recently opened up private orbs access to all CircleCI customers, including those on the Free plan.

Getting started with continuous integration for Nest.js APIs

Nest.js is a scalable and efficient server-side Node.js framework built with TypeScript. Nest.js was created to provide a structural design pattern to the Node.js development world. It was inspired by Angular.js and uses Express.js under the hood. Nest.js is compatible with the majority of Express.js middleware. In this tutorial, I will lead you through building a RESTful API with Nest.js. The tutorial will familiarize you with the fundamental principles and building blocks of Nest.js.

CircleCI now offers the most generous free plan anywhere

TL;DR: Our free plan is newly re-launched, giving teams access to more build minutes, larger resource classes, and our most popular features formerly only available on paid plans. Visit our sign up page to get started today. Our mission has always been to help teams deliver software faster and better, and today marks a huge milestone for development teams everywhere: we are proud to now offer the most feature-rich and most generous free tier for CI/CD on the market.

What developers get, out-of-the-box, from the most generous free plan anywhere

Freemium plans are a great way for companies to introduce developers to their products and offer a hands-on demonstration of the value they provide. But it can be extremely frustrating for developers when a free tier limits access to key features or doesn’t provide enough capacity to evaluate how the product performs in real-world development scenarios.

Config best practices: Docker layer caching

Let’s face it: Creating the optimal CI/CD workflow is not always a simple task. In fact, writing effective and efficient configuration code is the biggest hurdle that many developers face in their DevOps journey. But you don’t need to be an expert to set up a fast, reliable testing and deployment infrastructure. With a few straightforward techniques, you can optimize your config.yml file and unleash the full potential of your CI/CD pipelines.

Season 1 Finale: The Top 3 Themes for Software Leaders in 2022

CircleCI CTO Rob Zuber reflects on season 1 of The Confident Commit, finding the common threads that emerged, including these top 3 themes for software leaders: complexity, scale, and people. Listen to Rob's take on where software is headed and hear about the upcoming season 2 of The Confident Commit.

Getting started with scheduled pipelines

CircleCI’s scheduled pipelines let you run pipelines at regular intervals; hourly, daily, or weekly. If you have used scheduled workflows, you will find that replacing them with scheduled pipelines gives you much more power, control, and flexibility. In this tutorial, I will guide you through how scheduled pipelines work, describe some of their cool use cases, and show you how to get started setting up scheduled pipelines for your team.

Building a React dashboard to visualize workflow and job events

Data visualization is the process of translating large data sets and metrics into charts, graphs, and other visuals. The resulting visual representation of data makes it easier to identify and share real-time trends, outliers, and new insights about the information represented in the data. Using CircleCI webhooks, we can gather data on workflow and job events. In this tutorial, I will lead you through the steps to create a React-based dashboard to visualize this data.

Building a Laravel API for CircleCI webhooks

Software applications consist of interconnected systems - each providing a specialized service towards the common goal of meeting a business need. As with any network, an efficient data exchange mechanism is key to its functionality, effectiveness, and responsiveness. In the past, data exchange was performed using polling requests. At regular intervals, a system would make a request to get the latest information or find out if there is an update to deal with.

HTTP request testing with k6

Many of the multi-faceted applications development teams deploy every day are loosely coupled and every service exists to power another service. Most teams developing fullstack applications know that testing the communication between these services essential. Part of the process is testing HTTP request endpoints, and this tutorial focuses on exactly that. I will lead you through learning how to extend the k6 framework to test our HTTP endpoints.