Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

When I started at Puppet three years ago, I saw a company with a tremendous customer base, an active open source community, an incredible reputation, products that solved some of the hardest problems in the operations space, and a passionate team that had deep values and was purpose-driven, both of which are at my core as a leader.

When your organization uses the cutting edge of technology to function, you may feel like it takes all your time and energy to stay on top of emerging trends. How are you supposed to anticipate what the future will hold when you have to balance those considerations with how to best provide for your customers’ needs today? It’s okay if you don’t have your finger on the pulse 100 percent of the time.

Developers strive to produce efficient code. Many times, developers will add code to their repositories and test it to make sure it works, but they are forgetting one very important step: benchmarking! Benchmarking allows developers to see the performance impact on their code output. If properly integrated into a CI/CD pipeline, it could prevent catastrophic drops in performance before any code is shipped/deployed at all.

For SaaS companies, the cloud plays a significant role in product creation and delivery. As one of the top drivers of COGS, cloud costs have a major impact on key financial metrics and can dramatically impact revenue and valuation. However, that creates a scenario ripe for conflict: Engineers make important decisions about features and functionality without clear insight into how those decisions will impact spending—and finance continuously gets surprised by seemingly exorbitant cloud bills.

Introducing OpenID Connect identity tokens in CircleCI jobs! This token enables your CircleCI jobs to authenticate with cloud providers that support OpenID Connect like AWS, Google Cloud Platform, and Vault. In this blog post, we’ll introduce you to OpenID Connect, explain its usefulness in a CI/CD system, and show how it can be used to authenticate with AWS, letting your CircleCI job securely interact with your AWS account, without any static credentials.