Modern software systems are complex, with services distributed across data centers, in many zones, all around the world. Gone are the days when we managed individual servers dedicated to our organization, comfortable with the knowledge of the unique quirks of our setup. Now we rely on others to manage massive data centers where we borrow small slices of virtual space on shared hardware, traveling over shared networks, all in a system we call the cloud.

GitOps. The term appears everywhere, but what are its benefits? And is it as difficult as it sounds? Well, GitOps is a pretty easy paradigm to integrate with your current processes. However, my saying it is “easy” doesn’t help you decide whether you want to adopt it or not. So, let’s talk about it.

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.