Cloud CI/CD is a force multiplier for development teams, especially those working remotely. Automated CI/CD takes load off of developers, allowing them to focus on building better products. Hosted CI/CD adds further benefit to this, ensuring that this newfound capacity isn’t spent managing the testing and deployment infrastructure, and that remote team members have easy access to CI/CD tools.

If you’ve worked in a large, security-minded organization, you know how developers’ need for speed often clashes with the organization’s need for security. Often this conflict erupts into a high-stakes battle between two teams with very different priorities and perspectives. Ok, it may not always be so dramatic, but the challenge of control and empowerment is very real.

As a software engineer, one of your goals is to ensure that your product can be accessed globally by your customers. It’s not enough that an app is bug-free and works flawlessly if it only works on localhost. Docker was introduced to solve the “it works on my machine” problem. For example, the particular version of a programming language a developer is using on Windows or MacOS may not be working on the hosting server.

The official CircleCI extension for Visual Studio Code is now available for anyone to download on the VS Code Marketplace. This extension was developed by the Developer Experience team of CircleCI and it includes two sets of features: the pipeline manager and the config helper. The config helper provides language support for CircleCI YAML files.