CircleCI Overview

Mindflow integrated CircleCI to enable users to automate parts of the developing life cycle.

What is CircleCI?

CircleCI is the world’s largest shared continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform that enables DevOps teams to release code rapidly and automate the build, test, and deployment. The whole process is fragmented into pipelines. And each pipeline is a set of instructions or steps that CircleCI will execute each time the code is updated.

Tema can configure CircleCI to run highly complex development pipelines efficiently. Teams can automatically integrate their repositories, such as GitHub, to trigger every code deployment from CircleCI.

CircleCI has two basic setups: Cloud and Server. Cloud is a hosted solution: everything runs on CircleCI’s premises. The Server is an On-Premise offering where clients install and maintain CircleCI on their infrastructure.  

How does CircleCI function?

Who can use CircleCI?

CircleCI is a CI/CD SaaS offering that enables DevOps teams to automate the build, test, and deploy code by connecting repositories directly to it. CircleCI is a CI CD platform that automates software applications’ builds, testing, and deployment. CircleCI can work seamlessly with different environments like Linux, macOS, Windows, and Android. Their solution is proprietary and connects to several services to consume their artifacts. CircleCI helps adopt these best practices by providing an efficient and secure infrastructure to their build pipelines by simplifying the DevOps process.

CircleCI Features

Insights Dashboard

This is the primary interface where DevOps teams can monitor different metrics of all CI/CD pipelines. It displays information regarding workflow status, duration, and data flows. It enables teams to:

• Track job and pipeline status
• Monitor Duration helps users identify instances to cache, insert parallelize, and efficiency bottlenecks.
• Optimize Consumption stores the financial activities’ data, including credit, spending per workflow

Insights Dashboard – CircleCi

Parallelism

With parallelism, users can automatically split and balance their tests across multiple containers to reduce their overall build time. As a result, teams can get feedback faster.

Orbs

An Orb is a reusable CircleCI configuration. Teams can reuse three types of orbs: Jobs, Executors, and Commands. Environment variables can be passed through jobs, Executor is the environment in which the code is executed, and Commands are the steps that developers can reuse in those environments.

Continuous deployment with CircleCI orbs

Auto-cancel redundant builds on GitHub

CircleCI’s intelligent features enable it to detect and cancel any queued or running builds on a branch when a newer build is triggered on that same branch. If the DevOps team finds and rectifies some errors in the existing code, they don’t need it to finish executing and can deploy the new codebase immediately.

Pipelines

CircleCI pipelines can be considered the top-level working file. Pipelines consist of workflows that ensure the correct execution of different commands. Pipelines are associated with a specific actor, are fixed, and have a linear lifecycle. A pipeline is automatically triggered when a project consisting of the CircleCI configuration file is updated. Pipelines can be scheduled and triggered manually through the CircleCI app or using another app by connecting it to CircleCI API.

Pipelines dashboard in the CircleCI app

Team Collaboration

CircleCI has excellent features that allow teams to collaborate seamlessly in real time. Teams can remotely manage core projects and pipelines within the platform. This way, CircleCI can act as the go-to codebase and deployment tool for fast-moving tech teams.

CircleCI Benefits

Diverse Support and Beginner Friendly

CircleCI has a vast range of infrastructure customizations across different performance ranges and operating systems, making it easy for technically diverse teams to quickly onboard and start collaborating.

Cloud-First

CircleCI’s Cloud offering is a cloud-based system that can make workflows easier for small and lean teams. This removes the extra burden of managing a local server. However, there is an option to use CircleCI on a private data server.

Multitasking Support

Generally, CI/CD tools only allow up to 20 DevOps team members to work on the code simultaneously. CircleCI enables teams more than ten times that size to run hundreds of concurrent tasks at different testing, building, and deployment stages.