CircleCI Extends CI/CD Platform Beyond the Cloud

Self-hosted customers of CircleCI‘s CI/CD platform will soon have access to the same features that cloud customers now enjoy. These include pipelines, CircleCI’s orbs (which are YAML-based reusable configuration files) scheduled workflows and other features.

“When we think of modern software development, we may default to the assumption that this work is happening in the public cloud. But there’s a big group of companies and developers that, for reasons of compliance or control, are required to work behind the firewall — in the private cloud, bare metal, or wherever they happen to run their infrastructure,” Nathan Fish, CircleCI senior product manager, said. “Traditionally, there haven’t been a lot of options for modern, scalable, hyper performant CI/CD for this group of developers.”

With the version 3 release of CI/CD platform, CircleCI has also extended security and compliance support as well as added new features.

The idea is to help meet the needs of DevOps with CI/CD production pipelines operating within firewalls, making it possible to work with Kubernetes clusters while taking advantage of CircleCI enterprise platform’s cloud capabilities.

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Server 3.x is built on the scalability of Kubernetes, “”so customers can run a highly performant, flexible CI/CD pipeline on their own computer,” Fish said. CircleCI Server 3.x’s capabilities now “brings all of the latest features of our cloud,” he said. Future enhancements such as “runner for macOS builds, observability dashboards, insights and setup workflows will be available to customers in future releases,” Fish said.

Beyond the addition of features like pipelines and orbs to Server 3.x, “the big update is the ability to run 3.x within your own Kubernetes cluster,” Fish said. “This delivers big benefits to customers in terms of scalability and high availability,” Fish said.

In the context of CircleCI’s existing offerings, server 3.x is intended for large-scale needs of customers with especially stringent data-compliance requirements for their software development and operations processes.

“While the majority of our customers use our cloud offering, customers who use Server 3.x tend to be big enterprises in highly regulated sectors — healthcare, financial services, and government come to mind,” Fish said. “These teams are doing important work, and we think they should have access to the best developer tools and experiences possible, regardless of their regulatory constraints.”

CircleCI also communicated the following capabilities server 3.x will offer:

• Enterprise-level security: Server 3.x enables customers to achieve the strictest security, compliance, and regulatory requirements with end-to-end control over their CircleCI installation. Customers can host the CircleCI services and applications in their own control plane, in order to keep all data within a private network.
• Maintenance and monitoring: Monitoring options with tools such as Grafana, Prometheus, Loki and others.
• Enhanced integrations options: Integrate into existing infrastructure such as Datadog, Splunk and ELK stack.