Everything You Need To Know About Workflow Automation With CircleCI

CircleCI is fast becoming the go-to continuous development and integration solution for the best applications in use today. All this attention is based on several exciting features that are unique to CircleCI. Certainly, the amount of CircleCI training an engineer gets can cause them to gravitate toward it. Still, even if you were only introduced to it today, there are things about the way CircleCI approaches CI/CD that’s causing developers to migrate from well-established solutions like Jenkins to it.

If you’re looking to automate parts of your software product’s pipeline, this short read will provide insights into a few reasons why you might find yourself more comfortable working with CircleCI. For one thing, the turnkey manner in which you can carry out builds, run automated tests, and deploy across multiple nodes will improve the way your target market thinks about your business.

Why CircleCI

To start with, new is always cooler. Well, not always, but in the case of CircleCI, this stands true. Created well after most of its competitors, it is, in many ways, an improvement in how we approach CI/CD. We’ve noted just six such ways that explain why you should take up CircleCI as your preferred automated integration and deployment partner.

CI/CD Automation at Its Best

The automation capabilities CircleCI offers make it crucial for teams that want to focus on the product and not the chores around the process. This happens once you have configured the build, test, and deploy iteration according to your policies. Engineers can enjoy coding and see results quicker. Your customers also get new features earlier.

Easy Migrations

Let’s assume you’ve been working with another CI/CD platform and one or more features available in CircleCI catches your eye. The thought of having to set up your infrastructure from the ground up again can deter you from moving to a new platform and enjoying that feature. Luckily, this isn’t a problem when moving to CircleCI.

Well-documented procedures on how to migrate from popular CI/CD platforms to CircleCI make the process as easy as pressing a few buttons. Seamless migration means you don’t lose any project functionality since the environment you’ll be moving to has already proved conducive for your applications. Take migrating from Jenkins as an example. Moving your code, pipelines, and any attached tools is as easy as filling out a form and trying your new environment for free.

CircleCI Orbs

You’re always going to need new testing environments before releasing stable versions to the public. Ordinarily, this involves manually punching in the environment variables each time you need a test server. With CircleCI, this is quickly becoming a thing of the past. Save yourself from repeating this task that’s prone to human error and more with orbs. A growing library of orbs, all encasing reusable variables, triggers, workflows, and jobs (among other args) is available for you to create copies of intended environments in microseconds.

Cloud and Local Implementation

With CircleCI, you’re not restricted to deploying your applications in the cloud. If you have strict security policies that are best monitored on-premises, you can opt to deploy and continuously build with CircleCI locally. The on-prem installation of CircleCI comes with just as many powerful features as the cloud deployment option. Both options are available for you to discover and build on. Better yet, pair the two to create a hybrid cloud architecture that guarantees easy scaling with improved security. By doing so, you set up your business for unprecedented growth.

The CircleCI Community

There are very few problems you’ll face when using CircleCI, and even fewer that are entirely new to your stack. A growing community of developers who actively share their experiences with one another surrounds the product. You’ll learn how a developer halfway across the world solved the problem that halted your work. This is often the fastest way to learn and improve your product pipelines. CircleCI Discuss is your way of building up your skills while connecting with other developers around the world. And, yes, it’s free.

Training and Documentation

If you’re more of the learn-by-doing type of developer, CircleCI has an opulently defined volume of documentation that takes you through all usage aspects. You can take the learning phase a step further with hands-on training sessions such as the CI/CD training provided by Cprime. Going this route gets you the expert advice, certification, and confidence to fully support your applications.

Sign Up for CircleCI Training

Learning and implementing the features above is a proven way to start automating your build, test, and deployment iterations. From reading this post, you should recognize that CircleCI is the next frontier in CI/CD. It’s now the newest voyager to the CI/CD quest. Signing up for CircleCI training, reading documentation, and building your first “Hello World!” instance with CircleCI will start you on a journey to building applications that users will enjoy experiencing. What’s more, that will set you in the right direction toward easier workflow management.