CircleCI Blog

By Ron Powell
Oct 22, 2018
Workflow testing for FIPS 140-2 compatibility

This is a guest post written by Drew Varner. It originally appeared on the NineFX blog, and has been republished here with his permission. We hope you enjoy!.

NineFX, a HUBZone/SDVOSB-certified, value-added reseller for CircleCI, supports both commercial and federal government customers. The software that we ship to our federal customers must meet specific regulatory requirements from the National Institute of Standards & Technology (NIST). NIST’s Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 140-2 is the standard that governs cryptographic modules in federal software.

Because we service both commercial and federal customers, in this post I will describe how we use CircleCI workflows to provide timely feedback on our software’s support of FIPS 140-2 cryptography, enabling us to monitor a project’s FIPS compatibility.

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- Industry
- Engineering
By Kunal Jain
Oct 16, 2018
CircleCI launches support for GitHub Checks

CircleCI now integrates with the GitHub Checks API, so you can see the status of your CircleCI workflows under the Pull Request Checks tab in the GitHub UI. Previously in the GitHub UI, users could only see the status of individual CircleCI jobs for a given pull request - there was no way to see the status of the workflows to which those jobs belonged. With checks enabled, users will now be able to go to the Checks tab in GitHub to view the full hierarchy and status of CircleCI builds.

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- Engineering
By Eddie Webb
Oct 15, 2018
Kubernetes deployments with Cloudflare

This post is the second in a series that covers multi-cloud deployment. The first post, “Dockerizing Java apps with CircleCI and Jib,” addressed using Google’s Jib project to simplify wrapping a Java application in Docker. This post covers multi-cloud deployment behind a global load balancer.

In the first post, we talked about building containerized applications and published a simple Java Spring Boot application with Google’s Jib. That process is efficient at building and assembling our application, but we did not address distribution. In this post, we will look at a method of deploying our Docker application to Kubernetes and enabling global access with Cloudflare’s domain name system (DNS) and proxy services.

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- Engineering
By Ricardo N Feliciano
Oct 10, 2018
Level up go test with gotestsum
Hey Gophers!

One of the many great things about Go (Golang) is how simple it is to run tests. With the changes we saw in Go v1.11, running tests is as simple as:
```
# To test only your current module
go test ./...

# To test your module as well as its direct and indirect dependencies
go test all
```
In this post, I’m going to show you how we can make the output of go test more useful for local development as well as for CircleCI.
Continue reading “Level up go test with gotestsum”
- Engineering
By Jim Rose
Oct 3, 2018
Modernizing federal DevOps: CircleCI becomes first continuous integration tool with FedRAMP authorization

CircleCI is now authorized by FedRAMP (the federal government’s program for assessing and authorizing technology vendors), making CircleCI the first CI/CD tool to meet the rigorous security and privacy standards required by government agencies.

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- Industry
- News
By Eddie Webb
Oct 2, 2018
Dockerizing Java apps with CircleCI and Jib

This post is the first in a series that includes multi-cloud deployment behind a global DNS.

The evolution of deployment platforms and orchestration engines has been a tremendous accelerant for application and infrastructure teams alike. Clear boundaries and well defined interfaces between the layers of our technology stack means we can rapidly iterate and deploy with repeatable results. For many teams, Docker has become a key ingredient in this architecture, allowing for deployment to platforms like Kubernetes.

Continue reading “Dockerizing Java apps with CircleCI and Jib”
- Engineering
By Justin Cowperthwaite
Sep 26, 2018
Tools for effective pairing

I have done somewhere in the range of 150 phone screens this year. Doubling your engineering organization means talking to a lot of people, and I mean a lot. I talk to them about their work history, their software philosophies, and the processes that help enable high quality software delivery. This regularly turns to processes to help enable a collaborative programming paradigm, and ultimately pairing. Inevitably I hear things like, “But, you’re fully remote!” and “How would you share a keyboard?”

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By Emma Webb
Sep 24, 2018
How to bring a new tool to your team (and not get squashed in the process): 5 tips for successful adoption

Bringing any new tool into an organization can feel like an uphill battle. It’s difficult to overcome inertia, even with the promise of improved workflows and happier teammates. Any change is hard, harder still when colleagues have grown attached to “the way we’ve always done things.” How can you get your team to see the light when you know there’s a better way?

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- Enterprise
By Angel Rivera
Sep 20, 2018
CircleCI and Docker: What you need to know

CircleCI 2.0 implemented build support using Docker executors. Upon releasing it, we quickly realized that one of the biggest barriers that CircleCI users encountered was a lack of experience with Docker. In this post, we will discuss Docker and some of the basic commands users should become familiar with.

What is Docker?

Here is a simplified definition of Docker:

“Docker is a platform for developers and sysadmins to develop, deploy, and run applications using containers.”

Docker is also referred to as an application packaging tool that enables applications to be configured and packaged into a Docker image that can be used to spawn Docker containers that run instances of the application. It provides many benefits including runtime environment isolation, consistency via code, and portability. Docker containers can run on any operating system that supports the Docker Engine. To our benefit, most operating systems do support it.

Continue reading “CircleCI and Docker: What you need to know”
- Engineering