CircleCI updates platform to enhance speed and efficiency

CircleCI announced updates to its continuous integration and continuous delivery platform that will help developers build, test and deploy code faster and with ease. The updates include an enhanced web user interface, new insights capabilities, and upgrades to convenience images, CircleCI’s fleet of pre-packaged Docker images.

These additions come on the heels of CircleCI’s $100 million Series E funding round and provide developers solutions needed to solve complex software development problems, and engineering teams a platform to automate efficiencies.

“As companies rapidly shift to digital-first, more cloud, automation, and developer tools are being called upon to facilitate these transitions. With this surge comes even more pressure for developers to perform fast and efficiently,” said Jim Rose, CircleCI CEO. “To alleviate this added pressure, CircleCI is dedicated to meeting engineering organizations - from startups to enterprises - where they are so they can focus their time on building what matters most.”

Updates include:

New convenience images now available for languages

CircleCI recently reconfigured a new fleet of Docker images, also known as CircleCI convenience images, specifically designed to run well in a continuous integration environment as opposed to a production or local one. These new images are fast, easy to download, and provide users an efficient way to build custom images instead of building from scratch.

CircleCI released a new category of these next-gen convenience images available for languages such as Python, Ruby, Rust, Go, and several others that come with improved documentation, more stability, and benefits from the highly efficient infrastructure they’re built on.

Although CircleCI is the only CI/CD solution to provide this, convenience images are open-source projects and can be used on other platforms outside of CircleCI.

Introducing Buildtrakr and other CircleCI insights endpoints updates

CircleCI in partnership with delivery analytics platform, Plandek, introduced Buildtrakr, the first analytics plugin for CircleCI users. Buildtrakr integrates with CircleCI and Git to synthesize commit and build performance data, and displays critical metrics in a flexible dashboard.

Daniel Lee, Plandek Co-CEO commented: “Buildtrakr provides CircleCI customers with the powerful metrics and analytics capabilities you need, to help build, test and deploy better with CircleCI.”

Additionally, CircleCI announced that their insights endpoints now offer start and end date parameters for workflows and jobs. These parameters restrict the range of executions returned based on their start times and provide users a new filter to use for testing analysis.

Completely updated web user interface rebuilt for efficiency and usability

CircleCI’s new frontend has been redesigned to help CircleCI users accomplish their most important tasks intuitively and efficiently. Key benefits of the new UI include:

• The ability to view status of entire pipelines more easily
• More useful for advanced users who leverage workflows
• 65% reduction in page load times

The redesigned interface features a new filterable view with nested workflow and job information, making it easier to scan the status of recent builds. Pages of the old UI were also overhauled to deliver more digestible job details, full-screen step outputs for easier debugging, and a clean configuration-as-code view.