You know you need to secure your software supply chain. Everyone’s telling you that these days - your executives, your vendors, even the United States government. Your organization has an initiative to do so, or maybe they’ve brought in an expert to help you achieve this goal. But hold on a minute - do we have a shared understanding of what a software supply chain is, and what exactly makes it secure?

A brownout is an intentional but temporary disruption of service. Why would a company purposely cause a brownout and when does it make sense? In this post I will explain the what and why of brownouts, and provide some recent examples.

For engineering teams, CI/CD is the key to improving their development cycles. CircleCI is committed to helping our customers optimize their pipelines to streamline delivery to production. If your team values speeding your time to market, commit to trying these 5 best practices. These are CircleCI’s recommendations for cutting your development cycle times and improving your CI/CD processes in general.

Developing a quality software is considered incomplete without writing tests. Not only does the test assure the quality but it profoundly helps developers while refactoring or re-writing a piece of code. When it comes to testing, having well-planned and thorough testing throughout the software development cycle is very important. The most commonly used types of tests today are unit tests and integration tests.

While doing packaging for Icinga, I noticed we have a lot of YAML files describing GitLab pipelines doing very similar jobs. The same build job across different operating systems. That’s wasteful behaviour, which leads to a bigger workload when it comes to modifying these jobs. Tasks like adding new versions and especially adding new operating systems become tedious. What I’m looking for is a way to have interchangeable values for our building jobs.

The most basic component of automated software development is a CI/CD pipeline. While the term "pipeline" has been used to describe a wide range of computer science concepts, we use it at CircleCI and throughout the DevOps industry to refer to the vast range of behaviors and activities that are involved in continuous integration (CI).

Two of the most important questions that people ask themselves on day 2 after adopting GitOps are: In the previous article of the series, I focused on what NOT to do and explained why using Git branches for different environments is a bad idea. I also hinted that the “environment-per-folder” approach is a better idea. This article has proved hugely popular and several people wanted to see all the details about the suggested structure for environments when folders are used.

Scheduling is an integral part of software development practices. Tools for scheduling jobs help development teams save time by scheduling recurring tasks — like modifying a database or sending out periodic emails — for execution at specified times. There are many to choose from, including cron for Linux, scheduled tasks for Windows, launchd for macOS, Jobber, and anacron.