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.

Developers strive to produce efficient code. Many times, developers will add code to their repositories and test it to make sure it works, but they are forgetting one very important step: benchmarking! Benchmarking allows developers to see the performance impact on their code output. If properly integrated into a CI/CD pipeline, it could prevent catastrophic drops in performance before any code is shipped/deployed at all.

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.

Adding automated testing to your CI/CD pipelines can help you ensure that you deploy changes safely. But as you continue to shift left, the number and complexity of tests are likely to increase, making them slower to run and harder to troubleshoot. Datadog CI Visibility can help you track the performance of your CI/CD pipelines and tests—and now you can also use Real User Monitoring (RUM) to monitor end-to-end (E2E) Cypress tests.

The new world is “always-on,” hyper-connected, massively distributed, and moving at an accelerated “near-real-time” pace.

Software programs today can be likened to a complex stew, with multiple ingredients sourced from disparate places. In software, open-source tools are a major ingredient. According to the 2020 Open Source Security and Risk Analysis (OSSRA) report produced by the Synopsys Cybersecurity Research Center, 99 percent of the codebases contain at least one open source component, with open source comprising 70 percent of the code overall.

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.

End-to-end testing, also known as E2E testing, is a methodology used for ensuring that applications behave as expected and that the flow of data is maintained for all kinds of user tasks and processes. This type of testing approach starts from the end user’s perspective and simulates a real-world scenario. For example, on a sign-up form, you can expect a user to perform one or more of these actions: You can use end-to-end testing to verify that all these actions work as a user might expect.

We are happy to announce that Bitbucket Pipelines now supports MacOS self-hosted runners. This is currently in beta. You can now create a self-hosted runner and run it on your MacOS infrastructure to run MacOS and IOS builds. Since you’re using your own runner, you won't be charged for Bitbucket Pipelines build minutes. This self-hosted runner will be non-containerised allowing your CI/CD step to access the host's hardware, such as the graphics card or any connected external devices.

Automation goes beyond just building solutions to replace complex or time-consuming manual processes. As the popular saying goes, “anything that can be automated should be automated.” For example, deploying updates to applications can and should be automated. In this tutorial, I will show you how to set up hands-free deployment of a FeathersJS app to Heroku.