Within this blog post, we’ll be highlighting some best practices tied to Argo CD, that allow you to leverage GitOps easily within your deployment workflow.

At Lightspeed, we maintain multiple large iOS projects as well as their modularized dependencies. The last year of acquisitions brought together many different approaches to CI/CD at our company. I recently led the initiative to bring these projects and practices into alignment. In this post, I will explain the goals we had for our continuous integration pipeline and the implementations we used to achieve them.

When is the last time you updated your CI/CD workflow? A year ago? Never? You are not alone, my friends. Reconfiguring workflows can be one of the most daunting tasks for DevOps practitioners. But with new opportunities to benefit from CircleCI plans, there’s one simple and effective place to start: understanding concurrency and parallelism. Using concurrency and parallelism can cut your build times significantly. But you need to know what they are and how to find them in your config file.

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.

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.

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).