According to the company, the main benefit of this new CircleCI releases feature is that it can give developers greater confidence in their releases and reduce mean-time-to-recovery for issues. 

Key capabilities that will come with CircleCI releases include the ability to connect CI/CD with customer experiences, automated rollbacks, real-time service validation, and performance degradation prevention.

The releases dashboard shows a timeline of releases for all components (with details on each), a list of release environments, and a list of components and their associated projects. 

“If you look at every other deploy and release vendor on the market, they’re built to service centralized release and operations teams who want tighter control over deploys,” said Rob Zuber, CTO of CircleCI. “But this doesn’t reflect the reality of elite software teams who depend on developers to drive and deliver fast innovation. Our approach to CircleCI releases provides a developer-centric workflow that enables them to ship faster and monitor new features in production coupled with the safety net of quickly rolling back releases if something goes wrong.”

This feature is now available for all CircleCI customers at no additional cost. It currently supports Kubernetes, Amazon SageMaker, and Argo Rollouts. 

The company also plans to add support for Blue-Green deployments later this year.

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Successful teams have workflow durations less than 10 minutes, recovery from failed runs in under an hour, success rates above 90% in the default branch of their application, and deployments at least once per day, though the actual number depends on the business. 

Workflow duration is a measure of how efficiently a software delivery pipeline provides feedback on the quality of code. The report states: “An exclusive focus on speed often comes at the expense of stability. A pipeline optimized to deliver unverified changes is nothing more than a highly efficient way of shipping bugs to users and exposing your organization to unnecessary risk. To be able to move quickly with confidence, you need your pipeline to guard against all potential points of failure and to deliver actionable information that allows you to remediate flaws immediately, before they reach production.” 

To achieve productive feedback throughout the pipeline, extensive testing is needed at all stages, so the optimal pipeline is the shortest time it takes to run through all of those tests. The 10 minute benchmark seems to be the shortest time to generate those test results.  

For companies surveyed in the report, the median performance was 3.3 minutes. 

Mean time to recovery measures the average time that it takes to go from a failed build signal to a successful pipeline run. For companies that have created a pipeline where they have a complete picture of their code health and possible failure points, it is easier to bring systems back to a deploy-ready state following a failure. 

“Diagnosing the failure and implementing a fix becomes a matter of evaluating test output and correcting or reverting defects rather than embarking on an endless bug hunt,” the report states. 

The report also revealed that while the benchmark for this metric is 60 minutes, the median performance across companies is slower than that at 64 minutes. 

Success rate is defined as the “number of passing runs divided by the total number of runs over a period of time.”

According to CircleCI in the report, a failed signal isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as the more important metric is the team’s ability to ingest the signal quickly and fix the error. 

Survey respondents fell below the industry benchmark of 90% on the default branch; The average success rate was 77%.

“While neither number reaches our benchmark of 90%, the pattern of non-default branches having higher numbers of failures indicates that teams are utilizing effective branching patterns to isolate experimental or risky changes from critical mainline code. And while success rates haven’t moved much over the history of this report, recovery times have fallen sharply. This is a  welcome sign that organizations are prioritizing iteration and resilience over momentum-killing perfectionism,” according to the report. 

And finally, throughput — which is the average number of workflow runs on a given day — is used to measure team flow because it tracks the units of work that are moving through the CI system. The industry median was 1.52 times per day. 

CircleCI did note that throughput isn’t necessarily a measure of quality of work, so it’s important to consider it alongside the other performance metrics to get the full picture. 

“Far more important than the volume of work you’re doing is the quality and impact of that work. Thoroughly testing your code and keeping your default branch in a deploy-ready state ensures that, regardless of when or how often changes are pushed, you can be confident they will add value to your product and keep your development teams focused on tomorrow’s challenges rather than yesterday’s mistakes,” the report wrote. 

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According to the company, the new self-hosted container runner is designed to provide greater flexibility and security in order to help developers simplify infrastructure management with greater traceability.

With these self-hosted runners, enterprise teams or those in more regulated industries have the ability to choose their own infrastructure for running jobs.

Additionally, this release offers teams greater control over their environments, allows them to build and test on a wider variety of architectures, and more.

“The goal at CircleCI has always been to help developers build great things and deliver to market faster,” said Jim Rose, CEO of CircleCI. “Our new self-hosted container runner leverages automation as a silver bullet so that customers can deploy with confidence without sacrificing power or cost efficiency.”

Key benefits of this release include: 

• The ability to self-host the infrastructure for their CI/CD pipelines while leveraging the other features of CircleCI Cloud.
• The ability to specify Docker images for CI/CD jobs with one line in configuration.
• The ability to integrate with Kubernetes APIs in order to spin up and down ephemeral pods that each execute CI/CD jobs. 

“The ephemeral nature of containers can enable DevOps teams to scale work up and down as needed to meet demand, reduce cost, and optimize their use of self-hosted runners. Solutions, such as the CircleCI self-hosted container runner, can also reduce toil by providing teams with more control without the hassle of administrative overhead,” Jim Mercer, research vice president of IDC DevOps and DevSecOps Solutions.

CircleCI has also added an integration with New Relic CodeStream, a platform that makes  observability accessible in a developers IDE. 

With this, teams can increase their ability to collaborate, visualize, and observe CI/CD data with increased context.

To sign up and get started with CircleCI, click here. 

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These include: 

1. Workflow durations are between 5-10 minutes on average 
2. Recovery from any failed run is fixed or reverted in under an hour
3. Success rates are above 90% for the default branch of the application
4. They deploy as often as their business requires and at least 1+ times per day

Additionally, the report found that holiday season downtime brings increased risk to a business. According to the report, this can be combated by setting up a robust test suite to back up teams and enable innovation even when members are out of the office.

The report also showed that organizations that prioritized an optimal team structure had higher success levels. Meaning that making simple changes to day-to-day business practices in order to ensure that meetings don’t conflict with peak productivity hours can be highly beneficial to a business’ overall success.

It was also revealed that the size of a team is not nearly as important as the testing tools in place. Teams that prioritize test-driven development can rely on their tooling to perform well during market swings, seasonal fluctuations, and times of uncertainty, regardless of the size of the team itself. 

The report also showed that the three most elite open-source projects on CircleCI have pipelines between ten and eleven minutes. Achieving high performance and product maturity is made possible with code that is well tested in the cloud, meaning that pipelines will take longer to complete. 

“One of the most important ways to improve an organization’s application development efficiency is to systematically understand which behaviors are beneficial and which lead to inefficiencies,” said Stephen O’Grady, principal analyst, RedMonk. “By analyzing years of data across tens of thousands of organizations, CircleCI is doing just that.”

The full report can be found here. It examines two years of data from over a quarter billion different workflows and almost 50,000 organizations globally on the CircleCI platform.

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LitmusChaos is an open-source chaos engineering platform that helps teams identify weaknesses and potential outages in infrastructures by inducing chaos tests in a controlled way. 

“The CNCF ecosystem has helped us build a strong and vibrant community around Litmus,” said Uma Mukkara, maintainer of the Litmus project and CEO of ChaosNative. “We have received consistent feedback from users since the launch of 1.0 release last year, which helped us come up with a robust set of features and a stable platform for cloud native chaos engineering.”

Firefox 96 released

Firefox 96 was released today with changes to CSS, HTTP, APIs and more. 

The hwb() function for use as a CSS color value has been implemented and Firefox now provides support for the ‘color-scheme’ property. Also, cookies sent from the same domain but using different schemes (for example http or https) are now considered to be from different sites with respect to the cookie SameSite directive. 

The full list of changes that will affect developers is available here. 

CircleCI adds extensive free plan

CircleCI launched a new free plan to give teams access to more build minutes, larger resource classes, and the most popular features that were formerly only available on paid plans. 

The new free plan includes up to 6,000 build minutes per month, unlimited users, free resource classes on Docker, Linux, and Windows, and more. 

“CircleCI is built to scale along with you. As you build on CircleCI and start to see the impact of the speed, flexibility, and power we bring your team, we have flexible, usage-based plans to support your team’s unique needs,” AJ Joshi, chief product officer at CircleCI, wrote in a blog post. 

Apache Flink 2.0 now available

The Apache Flink community announced the release of Flink ML 2.0.0. 

Flink ML is a library that provides APIs and infrastructure for building stream-batch unified machine learning algorithms, that can be easy-to-use and performant with (near-) real-time latency.

The new release includes a major refactor of the earlier Flink ML libraries and introduces major features that extend the Flink ML API and the iteration runtime.

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With Test Insights, CircleCI users can now save time by addressing code failures faster. In addition, Test Insights brings users new features and benefits, including 

• Flaky test detection to pinpoint tests with unpredictable behavior and determine which tests have the potential to pass and fail indeterminately through proactive flagging 
• Meaningful lookback periods to understand performance changes over time 
• Improved velocity with test insights by identifying the longest running and most failed tests, acting quickly to fix them, and providing feedback to the developer sooner 
• And the ability to make actionable improvements with insight trends 

JetBrains TeamCity 2021.2

JetBrains announced TeamCity 2021.2, introducing two-factor authentication as well as a variety of updates to the integration with Perforce Helix Core and Perforce Helix Swarm and further integration with JetBrains Space.

In addition, with this release Azure users can now log into TeamCity using their Azure AD accounts and C# developers have the ability to set up build steps using the new C# script build runner. JetBrains TeamCity 2021.2 also brings a number of improvements to the Kotlin DSL syntax as well as updates to the Sakura UI.

For a full list of changes and updates in TeamCity 2021.2, visit here.

Aqua Security changes its Open Source Contributor License 

Aqua Security announced that it will be changing its contributor license agreement (CLA) in order to make the contributing process available to everyone interested. Previously, Trivy and CloudSploit were the only Aqua projects that had a CLA.

In addition, the previous CLA at Aqua was not corporate-friendly, making contributing a challenge for developers working for organizations that project their employees’ IP. These changes to Aqua’s contributor license work to simplify the CLA as well as introduce a corporate CLA and uniformly enforce the changes across its open source portfolio.

Jellyfish launches DevOps Metrics

Jellyfish today announced the launch of Jellyfish DevOps Metrics. This new feature allows software development and DevOps teams to track and optimize the delivery of software. Users will also be able to automate the measurement of metrics, like Lead Time, Deployment Frequency, Mean Time to Restore, and Change Failure Rate.

Jellyfish DevOps Metrics analyzes signals from Continuous Integration, Incident Management, Issue Tracking, and other DevOps tools in order to provide constant visibility into the state of a team’s DevOps practices. 

With this launch, users can measure and continuously improve the strategy and operations of their organization, spanning across the organization from the structure and allocation of resources to the health and performance of their teams. This works to ensure fast and efficient software delivery.

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“As teams continue to increase the release frequency of complex apps and services, observable CI/CD pipelines are more critical than ever. With CircleCI webhooks, developers can build high quality, customizable integrations across their CI/CD, analytics, monitoring, incident management and other applications to enable more informed software decisions,” said Apurva Joshi, chief product officer at CircleCI.

CircleCI believes that this new offering will enable development teams to streamline their workflows and increase engineering velocity.

For example, its integration with Sumo Logic utilizes webhooks to collect event information from CircleCI, which enables teams to better track the performance and health of their CI/CD pipelines.  

“Collecting, enriching, and correlating data from across disparate sources in the modern DevOps toolchain is one of the biggest challenges of today’s engineering teams,” said Drew Horn, director of business development at Sumo Logic. “With CircleCI webhooks, developers can now — in just a few clicks — push detailed, automatically instrumented pipeline data to Sumo Logic’s Continuous Intelligence Platform to benchmark and optimize their software delivery performance with deep insights and real-time analysis of the SDLC from end to end.”

Users will be able to leverage webhooks to build automation systems using real-time notifications, visualize and analyze job and workflow events, and receive internal notifications when jobs are completed.

As part of this launch, the company also announced an integration with Datadog’s new CI Visibility tool, and will be one of the first CI/CD platforms to do so. CI Visibility can be used to visualize key metrics like the number of failed builds or average build time. 

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The latest release includes new API management capabilities that add tools and support for API developers that want to take a design-first approach to app creation in which the design and specifications of the API are developed before creation of the integration pipeline. 

In addition, SnapLogic added API versioning in this release, which enables developers to easily create new API versions and to manage the assets and policies of each version independently. 

Ionic Portals released

Ionic Portals provides users a supercharged Web View native control to enable native and web teams to better collaborate and create new and existing web experiences in a mobile and safe, controlled way. 

Ionic Portals solves the issues that stock Web View controls have such as lacking features that expose additional native functionality to the web experience. The new solution provides the ability to programmatically define new APIs that web developers can consume in a controlled manner. 

Ionic Portals is currently in closed alpha with a few early adopter mobile teams. Additional details are available here.

CircleCI Series F of funding

CircleCI announced that it raised $100 million for its Series F funding round to help developers deliver high-quality code quickly. 

The company said it will use the funds to invest in its platform, build out its Insights dashboard and expand its fleet of over 20 compute options. 

CircleCI plans on bringing more features such as dynamic config, private orbs and test insights.

Exabeam Fusion XDR and Fusion SIEM

Exabeam announced Fusion XDR and Exabeam Fusion SIEM, two cloud-delivery products that aim to solve threat detection, investigation and response (TDIR) without disrupting an organization’s existing technology stack. 

Exabeam Fusion combines behavior analytics, TDIR automation and pre-built integrations that find abnormal activity and then build Smart Timelines to automatically reconstruct security incidents. Fusion SIEM includes all Fusion XDR features and capabilities plus access to centralized log storage, powerful search, and compliance reporting

“When security analysts are unable to connect the dots between various systems, malicious attacks go undetected and lead to security breaches. Delivering Exabeam Fusion XDR and Exabeam Fusion SIEM from the cloud enables us to accelerate feature and functionality development, while deploying a use case framework that consistently delivers successful outcomes for our customers,” said Adam Geller, the chief product officer at Exabeam. 

Deno 1.1 released

The Deno 1.1 release includes new features and improvements to the built-in test runner. 

Before this release, Deno ran all tests serially inside a single runtime instance. Now all discovered test modules are run in isolation using a new instance of a runtime for each of the modules. It also now supports a ‘permissions’ option that allows users to specify exact permissions that can be applied to a use case. 

Structured clones and remote import maps are now supported in Web Workers. Also, the Web Storage API has been added. 

Digital Twin Consortium’s new open-source collaboration community

The Digital Twin Consortium (DTC) announced a new open-source collaboration community to accelerate the adoption of digital twin-enabling technologies and solutions.

“Open-source projects are more flexible and respond more rapidly to market demands than closed counterparts,” said Dan Isaacs, the CTO of DTC. “Our Open-Source Collaboration Community initiative will substantially expand the DTC ecosystem and facilitate the adoption of digital twin and digital twin enabling technologies.”

To be able to contribute to the open-source collaboration community, candidates must complete a project application which the DTC Technical Advisory Committee reviews. If approved, contributors can upload their project or related content to the DTC Open-Source Collaboration GitHub site. 

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In a webinar on how to help teams build better software faster, technical content marketing manager at CircleCI Ron Powell and Contentful software engineer Sergiy Tupchiy looked at the four metrics and what it really looks like in practice. 

“It does look different when you try to actually apply the measurement of these to your case. And then it also looks different when you try to describe the value of optimizing on these four metrics to the rest of your organization,” Powell explained in the webinar. 

The first metric, duration, measures the length of a workflow. While teams want to be around five minutes, Powell found the 50th percentile looks something closer to about 10 minutes. 

“If you’re really well above 10 minutes, I think that that’s probably a pretty good place to start, trying to find ways to make improvements,” Powell said. 

Powell said the next category, mean time to recovery, is the most valuable metric and the one organizations should focus on lowering. Companies in the 50th percentile have a mean time to recover of under an hour. 

For the third category, Powell explained monitoring throughput is more valuable than trying to match some other organization that builds software in a different paradigm. 

Lastly, success rate depends on what is being measured. Powell said companies should be looking at 90 to 95% success rate for their main branches. The success rate can dip lower for the feature branches that deal with building cutting-edge software. 

There are some proven ways in which to create a more successful DevOps environment that were outlined by Contentful’s Tupchiy.

One way is to form an internal engineering productivity team and to standardize data sources to define what is applicable and what can be scrapped. 

Engineering teams should also act on the insights and tie in the KPI data with other engineering business systems. 

To learn more about the practices and metrics that will help teams build better software and faster in 2021 watch the webinar here.

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“Agile Flame Graphs allows software engineers to select a section of code and instantly visualize the latency between functions and individual lines of code, within and across distributed systems,” said Liran Haimovitch, the CTO and co-founder of Rookout. 

According to the company, Agile Flame Graphs collect the most useful data across applications such as CPU consumption and latency between microservices and then visualizes it in an easily-accessible manner.

ServiceNow acquires Intellibot
ServiceNow announced plans to acquire Intellibot to build its capabilities natively into the Now platform and to enable customers to more easily integrate into modern and legacy systems. 

ServiceNow stated that the acquisition supports ServiceNow’s commitment to the Indian market and it also plans to develop two new data center facilities by the first quarter of 2022. 

“We are proud to join forces with ServiceNow as it continues to invest in powerful end‑to‑end automation capabilities to make the world of work, work better for people,” said Srikanth Vemulapalli, CTO and co‑founder of Intellibot. “Our RPA combined with ServiceNow workflows will help businesses better connect disparate systems to accelerate innovation and thrive in a new world of work.”

CircleCI server 3.x released
CircleCI server 3.x is an enterprise-focused Kubernetes for self-hosted CircleCI installations that enables customers to achieve strict security requirements with end-to-end control over CircleCI installations. 

The latest CircleCI features offer the same benefits as the cloud native-offering including pipelines, orbs, matrix jobs, scheduled workflows and more. 

“The latest server release is an ideal solution for teams that have in-house DevOps and Kubernetes expertise, have their own data centers, or have other highly custom needs that can’t be served elsewhere,” Nathan Fish, a senior product manager at CircleCI wrote in a blog post.

GraphQL Editor 4.5 released
GraphQL Editor 4.5 introduces a relational view, which is a new way to display the GraphQL schema of a project.

Other new features in version 4.5 include a UI upgrade, an interactive learning zone and GitHub integration. 

The developers behind the project are now working on adding microservices written in Go and TypeScript (Deno) that allow users to build and host a backend on popular cloud servers, all without leaving GraphQL Editor.

Additional details are available here.

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