Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Before automation became commonly used by software development teams, bottlenecks, repetitive tasks, and human error were rampant. Automation has freed up valuable human resources for organizations while reducing the risk of human error caused by active human brains trying to perform mundane repetitive tasks. Recent strides in the area of continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) have made it more feasible to automatically deploy updates to software applications.

Most developers care about building the next big thing. Automating your build, test, and release processes allows you to maintain focus on innovating and delivering value to your users. By combining the power of best-in-class CI/CD workflow orchestration with managed environments-as-a-service, developers can stay focused on building what’s next.

Now that development teams know about CI/CD, there is no reason for deployments to become a time-consuming and cumbersome process. CI/CD may start with continuous testing, but adding automated deployments takes your CI/CD practice to the next level. Continuous deployment slashes the time it takes to release so you can spend more time improving the quality of your applications.

When you think of software testing, what comes up first? For many developers, unit tests and integration tests are often top of mind. Both software testing methods are vital to writing and maintaining a high-quality production codebase. But they are not sufficient on their own. Your team’s testing practice should assess the entire application, observe the larger story of how it operates when functioning correctly, and raise alarms when deviations are found.

The explosion of talent available for remote work (and the widespread acceptance of remote first employment) allows for global collaboration on an unprecedented scale.

As digital transformation accelerates and more organizations use software solutions to facilitate work operations, security threats have become more commonplace. Cybercriminals tirelessly develop ways to exploit software application vulnerabilities to target organizational networks. A notable example is the 2017 Equifax data breach, which exposed the personal details of 145 million Americans.

Modern software systems are complex, with services distributed across data centers, in many zones, all around the world. Gone are the days when we managed individual servers dedicated to our organization, comfortable with the knowledge of the unique quirks of our setup. Now we rely on others to manage massive data centers where we borrow small slices of virtual space on shared hardware, traveling over shared networks, all in a system we call the cloud.

Here on the CircleCI Insights team we don’t just develop stuff for CircleCI users, we are CircleCI users. Really, there’s no better way to get to know your product than to use it, and the Insights team is no exception. A few months ago, we realized that our pipeline configuration for the Insights UI left much to be desired.

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.

Go, an open-source programming language backed by Google, makes it easy to build simple, reliable, and efficient software. Go’s efficiency with network servers and its friendly syntax make it a useful alternative to Node.js. All network applications need well-tested features, and those developed in Go are no different. In this tutorial, we will be building and testing a simple Go blog.