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CircleCI Delivers on Kubernetes Promise

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by Mike Vizard

CircleCI today announced that the latest server edition of its namesake continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform, that is deployed on Kubernetes, is now generally available.

Jim Rose, CircleCI CEO, says this edition provides feature parity with the cloud service that CircleCI provides to organizations that, for compliance or security reasons, prefer to deploy a CI/CD platform themselves.

CircleCI server 3 can be self-hosted on a local instance of Kubernetes or on public cloud services such as Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). That capability makes it possible to take advantage of Kubernetes to scale consumption of IT infrastructure up and down as application development requirements dynamically change, Rose notes.

DevOps teams can also take advantage of CircleCI’s orbs to streamline workflows across a wide range of DevOps tools in addition to monitoring those environments using open source tools such as Prometheus, Rose adds. Future enhancements planned for CircleCI Servers include access to CircleCI’s Insights dashboard, runner for MacOS builds, GovCloud support and observability dashboards.

CircleCI Kubernetes support is arriving at a time when a debate is emerging over how DevOps best practices should evolve in the age of Kubernetes. Proponents of GitOps best practices are making a case for enabling platforms running Kubernetes to automatically pull code from Git repositories versus waiting on a continuous integration (CI) framework to push code out to a specific target platform. That approach would enable DevOps teams to finally automate continuous delivery (CD) processes in a way that has, thus far, proven difficult to accomplish.

However, Rose says such an approach would constitute an anti-pattern. DevOps workflows span tools and processes that go beyond the code stored in a Git repository that are easier to manage via a CI platform integrated with a CD platform deployed on top of Kubernetes.

Regardless of approach, Kubernetes is emerging as a critical lynchpin for finally achieving CD. While DevOps teams have generally mastered CI, the CD side of the DevOps equation has been challenging. Each enterprise platform an application is deployed on is unique, which makes it difficult to automate continuous delivery. Kubernetes provides a common layer of abstraction above each platform that makes it easier to programmatically automate a CD process.

Kubernetes, of course, is gaining additional traction as more organizations embrace microservices-based applications that generally require them to adopt DevOps best practices to build, maintain and update. Those applications are also being distributed across an extended enterprise that spans public clouds, local data centers and, now, edge computing platforms. As such, the number of organizations that will be employing DevOps best practices to build and deploy microservices-based applications across all those platforms should steadily increase in the months and years ahead.

In fact, it’s becoming apparent that application development and deployment is entering a new era that will most certainly challenge all previous assumptions of what constitutes a best DevOps practice.

Mike Vizard

Mike Vizard is a veteran IT journalist with more than 25 years of experience covering the technology industry, having previously served as Editor-in-Chief of both CRN and InfoWorld and as editorial director for Ziff-Davis Enterprise, where he oversaw titles including eWEEK, CIO Insight and Baseline. Over his career he has also edited or contributed to a wide range of enterprise technology publications, including IT Business Edge, Channel Insider, ComputerWorld, TMCNet and Digital Review, and he later led editorial for CTOEdge.com. His reporting and analysis span software development, cloud computing, cybersecurity, IT channel strategy and, more recently, artificial intelligence and DevOps practices. A recognized voice in enterprise IT journalism, Vizard is known for tracking emerging technology trends as they move from early adoption into mainstream enterprise use. He now serves as Chief Content Officer for Techstrong Group, where he oversees editorial strategy across the full network — DevOps.com, Security Boulevard, Cloud Native Now, Digital CxO, Techstrong.ai, TechStrong.IT, Techstrong Semi and PlatformEngineering.com — in addition to writing and hosting content for Techstrong TV and the Techstrong Gang podcast.

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