CI/CD systems follow a multi-tiered environments pattern: development, testing, staging, and production release are all part of this process. Each setting in this cycle could have a variety of set ups and configurations. As a result, having to set up separate configurations for different environments could be inconvenient and burdensome. In this tutorial, we will take a look at what Docker is and how it has freed developers from set-up problems and port clashes.

When you are the only dev building a software project, you can create and modify your code according to personal preference. When you contribute code to a team-run project, you need to follow a standardized set of guidelines and coordinate precisely with other team members. Standard guidelines and coordinated work effort are vital to the success of every team-based software development project.

At CircleCI, CI has a second meaning: Continuous Improvement. We continuously seek out feedback not only to improve our code but to improve our processes and get better at our jobs along the way. This Continuous Improvement starts with one important company value: a blameless culture. Our blameless culture extends into every part of how we operate.

The DevOps field is engaged in a great, collective migration into the cloud. Businesses are decentralizing their applications and databases, hosting them in the cloud to make them available regardless of geography or user device. Some organizations choose to host their applications on private servers, but in periods of high demand take advantage of the public cloud by directing overflow traffic to cloud servers. This approach is called cloud bursting.

Ever since CircleCI introduced webhooks, I have been excited about the possibilities this new way of integration opens up to developers. I decided to try out one of the use cases described in the webhooks documentation. This use case involves transmitting information about build-pipeline workflows into an Airtable database. The data piped into Airtable forms a log for you to monitor your workflows and you can go as far as designing graphs and other visualizations to analyze the build data.

Breaking changes in production are inconvenient and can be costly to fix. Using commands like git clone < some GitHub repository >, executed on your terminal is a common practice, known as using the command line. This practice can be faster and more efficient than using a GUI. For this tutorial, I will walk you through the process of testing command-line applications git, explain why you need command-line applications, and describe in detail how they work.

Configuration files can take some time to set up, but after that initial push they are easy to forget about. “If it’s not broken, don’t fix it” is a common approach that many developers take with their configuration files. But when it comes to your continuous integration pipelines, small changes can have huge benefits.