Modern software development is fast, continuous, and automated. Today, by research company Statista[1]'s count, 88% of organizations are using Agile methods and Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD)[2]. Yet there remains one major stumbling block: Moving a freshly minted program from a CI pipeline[3] to delivery to a cloud or other service provider. That's where DevOps company CircleCI[4] comes in with a new suite of orb integrations with 20 partners such as Amazon Web Services (AWS)[5], Google Cloud[6], Salesforce[7], and others. These enable developers to automate remote deployments in minutes from their CI/CD pipeline.
Orbs[8] are CircleCI packages that fit into the end of the CI/CD software delivery automation workflows. They are "parameterizable" packages that condense commands, executors, and jobs into single, reusable lines of code.
Now, in partnership with numerous cloud and service providers, the new orbs help automate deployments. It can take hours to write integrations to deploy to services such as AWS Elastic Container Service (ECS)[9], AWS Serverless[10], or Google Cloud Run[11]. Deployment orbs allow developers to deploy applications in minutes using a pre-packaged configuration.
By simplifying and speeding up the process teams can ship new features faster than ever. For companies deploying to multi-cloud[12] environments, this greatly reduces the work needed to move a program to two or more clouds.
CircleCI currently has more than 116 certified and partner orbs from technology services such as Heroku, Kubernetes, and Helm, and over 1,200 total orbs listed in the CircleCI orb registry.[13]
Some of the most important of these orbs in this release are listed in the Continuous deployment with CircleCI orbs