CircleCI

37.791303°N 122.392019°W / 37.791303; -122.392019

Circle Internet Services, Inc.
TypePrivate
IndustryCI/CD[1]
FoundedSeptember 1st, 2011
FoundersPaul Biggar, Allen Rohner[2]
Headquarters
San Francisco
,
United States
Key people
Jim Rose (CEO)[1]
ProductsCircleCI.com (Saas), CircleCI Enterprise (on-prem)
Number of employees
650
Websitecircleci.com

CircleCI is a continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) platform that can be used to implement DevOps practices.[2] The company was founded in September 2011 and has raised $315 million in venture capital funding as of 2021, at a valuation of $1.7 billion.[1] CircleCI is one of the world's most popular CI/CD platforms.[3] Facebook, Coinbase, Sony, Kickstarter, GoPro, and Spotify used CircleCI in 2019.[4][1]

Timeline

2011

  • The company was founded in September 2011. The product was first released for beta testing on October 11, 2011.[5] The first customers appeared three months after starting the company,[6] while it was 6 months before the first payment.[7]

2013

  • Typed Clojure was used at CircleCI in production systems from September 2013 to September 2015.[8]

2014

  • In 2014, CircleCI acquired Distiller, a mobile continuous integration tool,[9] where Jim Rose and Rob Zuber joined to assume CEO and CTO.[10] Paul Biggar left the company after six months, but remains on the board.[6] The company grew quickly from 20 employees at the end of 2014 to 60 employees in summer 2016.[11]

2016

  • In 2016, there was some controversy when Uber, who shared an office building with the company, redesigned their logo to be quite similar to CircleCI's.[12] Another very similar logo can be found in the 2017 film The Circle.[13]

2018

  • In June 2018, CircleCI opened their first international office in Tokyo, and in October 2018 they opened an office in Boston, MA.[10]
  • In October 2018, CircleCI became the first CI/CD tool authorized by FedRAMP.[14]

2019

  • In May 2019, CircleCI opened an office in Denver, CO.[10]
  • In August 2019, CircleCI made support for Windows builds generally available.[15]
  • In November 2019, CircleCI opened an office in London.[16]

2020

  • In February 2020, CircleCI launched support for AWS GovCloud.[10]
  • In May 2020, CircleCI became the first CI/CD company to offer fully-compensated paid leave for employees recovering from transition-related medical procedures.[10]
  • In October 2020, CircleCI released an insights dashboard for customers to monitor and optimize their CI/CD pipelines.[10]
  • In November 2020, CircleCI introduced self-hosted runners (including Arm support) on its cloud platform.[10]

2021

  • In April 2021, CircleCI's cloud-hosted service announced SOC 2 Type II compliance.[10]

2022

  • In January 2022, CircleCI announced a more generous free tier.[17]

Milestones and incidents

Financing

CircleCI raised $50k from a small investor a few months after starting,[18] $1.5m in seed funding in 2013,[19] a $6m Series A round from DFJ in 2014, a $18M Series B financing round from Scale Venture Partners in 2016, a $31M Series C led by Top Tier Capital Partners in 2018,[20] a $56M Series D led by Owl Rock Capital and NextEquity Partners in 2019,[4] a $100M Series E round led by IVP in 2020,[2] and a $100M Series F round led by Greenspring Associates in 2021.[1] In total this is $315 million in funding.

Acquisitions

CircleCI acquired Distiller in 2014, Vamp in 2021, and Ponicode in 2022.[1][21]

Data breaches

In 2013, CircleCI suffered a major data breach due to its provider MongoHQ, but was able to quickly respond and replace its security keys, resulting in almost no lost customers.[22]

In August 2019, there was a data breach in a third-party analytics vendor account used by CircleCI.[23]

In January 2023, CircleCI announced a recent system breach and advised customers to rotate "any and all secrets" stored in CircleCI.[24]

Product

CircleCI monitors GitHub, GitHub Enterprise, and Atlassian Bitbucket repositories and launches builds for each new commit.[25] CircleCI automatically tests builds in either Docker containers or virtual machines and deploys passing builds to target environments.[4] A dashboard and API allow tracking the status of builds and metrics related to builds.[26] A Slack integration notifies teams if issues arise.[2][27]

SSH support allows locally running jobs, and security measures prevent tampering.[4] CircleCI also offers a workflow approval feature that pauses the job(s) until manual approval is given.[28]

CircleCI supports Go, Java, Ruby, Python, Scala, Node.js, PHP, Haskell, and any other language that runs on Linux or macOS.

The company offers a managed cloud service with a free tier available.[29] The platform can also be self-hosted on a private server (behind a corporate firewall), or as a private deployment in the cloud.[30] The cloud service was initially written from scratch but now uses HashiCorp's Nomad and Kubernetes.[31]

CircleCI reduces risk by ensuring frequent testing and releases, and with the managed cloud service, takes care of CI infrastructure maintenance and provisioning.[11] The cloud service can be set up within minutes, but is less customizable than Jenkins.[32]

Orbs

Orbs are shareable snippets of YAML that can be used to simplify CircleCI builds and perform deployments.[1][33] CircleCI had integrations with 45 partners as of 2019.[4] CircleCI's target deployment environments include Amazon Web Services, Heroku, Azure, Google Compute Engine, Docker images, and virtual Linux, Android, Windows, or macOS machines with VMware. In 2018 CircleCI's config.yml was the fastest growing YAML file on GitHub.[34]

The proprietary configuration syntax introduces vendor lock-in, meaning that switching CI services requires rewriting the pipeline.[35]

See also

References
  1. Sawars, Paul (11 May 2021). "Continuous software integration/delivery platform CircleCI nabs $100M". VentureBeat. Retrieved 17 January 2022.
  2. Wiggers, Kyle (7 April 2020). "CircleCI raises $100 million for automated app testing and deployment". VentureBeat. Retrieved 17 January 2022.
  3. Atkinson, Brandon; Edwards, Dallas (19 December 2018). Generic Pipelines Using Docker: The DevOps Guide to Building Reusable, Platform Agnostic CI/CD Frameworks. Apress. p. 96. ISBN 978-1-4842-3655-0.
  4. Wiggers, Kyle (23 July 2019). "CircleCI raises $56 million to continuously test software builds for bugs". VentureBeat. Retrieved 17 January 2022.
  5. "CircleCI on Twitter". Twitter.
  6. Kennedy, John (2 July 2018). "Going Dark: How Paul Biggar is building the future of software". Silicon Republic. Retrieved 17 January 2022.
  7. Marks, Trisha. "Finding Product-Market Fit in Start-Up Marketing". www.properexpression.com. Retrieved 18 January 2022.
  8. Bonnaire-Sergeant, Ambrose; Davies, Rowan; Tobin-Hochstadt, Sam (2016). "Practical Optional Types for Clojure". Programming Languages and Systems. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. 9632: 68–94. arXiv:1812.03571. doi:10.1007/978-3-662-49498-1_4. ISBN 978-3-662-49497-4. S2CID 18361363.
  9. Hall, Susan (17 December 2014). "CircleCI buys Distiller to Support Mobile App Development". The New Stack. Retrieved 17 October 2022.
  10. "CircleCI milestones". CircleCI. Retrieved 2022-06-07.
  11. "Make way for the modern continuous integration and delivery platform software teams love to use: CircleCI". The Silicon Review.
  12. Wieczner, Jen (February 19, 2016). "People are Accusing Uber of Stealing This Startup's Logo". Fortune. Retrieved 1 February 2017.
  13. Lincoln, Kevin (28 April 2017). "Isn't It Weird the Logo in The Circle Looks Just Like Uber's?". Vulture. Retrieved 17 October 2022.
  14. Sargent, Jenna (4 October 2018). "SD Times news digest: CircleCI authorized by FedRamp, KotlinConf announcements, and Google extends PyTorch support". SD Times. Retrieved 18 January 2022.
  15. Speed, Richard. "They're climbing through the Windows: CircleCI goes native on Microsoft's OS". www.theregister.com. Retrieved 18 January 2022.
  16. Speed, Richard. "The lure of Brexit Britain proves too great for DevOps pipeline wrangler CircleCI". www.theregister.com. Retrieved 18 January 2022.
  17. "CircleCI now offers the most generous free plan anywhere". CircleCI. 2022-01-11. Retrieved 2022-07-11.
  18. Biggar, Paul. "I founded CircleCI (valued at $1.7B) and Darklang. AMA!". Indie Hackers. Retrieved 18 January 2022.
  19. Darrow, Barb (25 February 2013). "CircleCI gets $1.5M to build out continuous integration service". Gigaom. Retrieved 17 January 2022.
  20. Tansey, Bernadette (17 January 2018). "Xconomy: CircleCI Nabs $31M to Enhance DevOps Platform With Automation Tools". Xconomy. Retrieved 18 January 2022.
  21. Lardinois, Frederic. "CircleCI acquires Ponicode". TechCrunch. Retrieved 22 April 2022.
  22. Harrison, Kim. "The Time Our Provider Screwed Us". LaunchDarkly. Retrieved 18 January 2022.
  23. Oates, John. "Today's data whoopsie is brought to you by CircleCI: Source safe, but look out for phishers". www.theregister.com. Retrieved 18 January 2022.
  24. Page, Carly (2023-01-05). "CircleCI warns customers to rotate 'any and all secrets' after hack". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2023-01-05.
  25. Bohon, Cory (20 December 2021). "CI/CD platforms: How to choose the right continuous integration and delivery system for your business". TechRepublic. Retrieved 19 January 2022.
  26. Riggins, Jennifer (8 April 2020). "CircleCI Insights Helps DevOps Teams Quantify High-Performance". The New Stack. Retrieved 18 January 2022.
  27. Rubens, Paul (June 21, 2016). "7 ways to get more from Slack". CIO magazine. Retrieved 1 February 2017.
  28. Wainewright, Phil (7 January 2020). "How CircleCI speeds DevOps cycle times with CI/CD automation". diginomica.com. Retrieved 18 January 2022.
  29. Dotson, Kyt (11 January 2022). "CircleCI is offering a new free CI/CD plan for DevOps teams with more features". SiliconANGLE. Retrieved 18 January 2022.
  30. Arora, Chandermani; Hennessy, Kevin; Noring, Christoffer; Uluca, Doguhan (21 December 2018). Building Large-Scale Web Applications with Angular: Your one-stop guide to building scalable and production-grade Angular web apps. Packt Publishing Ltd. p. 518. ISBN 978-1-78995-832-4.
  31. Oliver, Kiran; Williams, Alex (16 November 2017). "CircleCI's Technical Architecture Is Built for Scalability". The New Stack. Retrieved 18 January 2022.
  32. Belmont, Jean-Marcel (29 August 2018). Hands-On Continuous Integration and Delivery: Build and release quality software at scale with Jenkins, Travis CI, and CircleCI. Packt Publishing Ltd. p. 266. ISBN 978-1-78913-307-3.
  33. Uluca, Doguhan (29 May 2020). Angular for Enterprise-Ready Web Applications: Build and deliver production-grade and cloud-scale evergreen web apps with Angular 9 and beyond, 2nd Edition. Packt Publishing Ltd. p. 459. ISBN 978-1-83864-660-8.
  34. Claburn, Thomas. "Behold, the world's most popular programming language – and it is...wait, er, YAML?!?". www.theregister.com. Retrieved 18 January 2022.
  35. Ostrowski, Adrian; Gaczkowski, Piotr (23 April 2021). Software Architecture with C++: Design modern systems using effective architecture concepts, design patterns, and techniques with C++20. Packt Publishing Ltd. p. 462. ISBN 978-1-78961-246-2.
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