Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Creating robust, manageable, and reusable functionality is a big part of my job as a CI/CD engineer. Recently, I wrote about managing reusable pipeline configuration by adopting and implementing pipeline variables within pipeline configuration files. As I showed in that tutorial, pipeline variables and orbs have added some flexibility to this process, but they are still a bit limited.

With the new release of dynamic config via setup workflows, CircleCI customers can now use jobs and workflows, not only to execute work but to determine the work they want to run. We built dynamic config because we know our users want more dynamism in the CircleCI build process. Historically, our platform has been very deterministic: the config is pre-set in a file based on the revision for a given pipeline.

“Smart” is the buzzword for strategic industries operating in Energy, Utilities, and Transportation. We are also starting to see this “Smart” nomenclature used in local authorities, defense and public services.

Your modern cloud-hosted applications rely on a number of key components—such as databases and load balancers—that are managed by the cloud provider. While these cloud resources can reduce the overhead of maintaining your own infrastructure, capturing and contextualizing monitoring data from services you don’t own can be difficult.

Gremlin helps teams proactively improve the reliability of their systems by running chaos experiments on infrastructure including hosts, containers, and Kubernetes clusters. But as microservice-based architectures and automated cloud platforms become the norm, engineers are shifting their focus from managing infrastructure to managing services. In order to keep these services as resilient as possible, they need tools that can help them find failure modes, reduce incidents, and improve availability.

No one likes giving their weekends up to fix release issues. Developers and operations teams are traditionally hesitant to make changes or deploy applications on a Friday, in case something goes wrong and they have to spend their weekend making emergency fixes. Or worse, trying to roll back changes that were made. However, with a strong set of practices and a reliable deployment pipeline, there should be no reason why a deployment cannot happen anytime — even on a Friday afternoon.