CircleCI Launches Release Agent to Automate Release Orchestration

CircleCI, the leading continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform, today unveiled CircleCI releases, which enables developers to automate the release orchestration process directly from the CircleCI UI. With current support for Kubernetes and Amazon SageMaker, developers now have end-to-end visibility of their deployments in production and access to rollback commands (e.g., restore version, scale component, and restart component) for seamless release management. CircleCI releases makes deploying code less risky, user-focused, and more accessible for developers to ship faster with confidence.

Today, developers operate in increasingly complex tech stacks yet are under pressure to move quickly without compromising software quality. As a result, elite engineering teams are incorporating agile development practices like progressive delivery and canary releases, which provide the guardrails necessary for risk-free deployments via the ability to target, segment, and roll back releases. CircleCI releases enables software teams to automate the progressive delivery process with support for Argo Rollouts, giving developers complete control over their releases. Future support for blue-green deployments is slated for later in 2024. By automating CI/CD pipelines directly into the release orchestration process, software teams dramatically reduce mean-time-to-recovery (MTTR), giving them the confidence to resolve issues should releases go awry with little to no impact on their customers.

Key features and benefits of CircleCI releases include:

• Change validation: Developers can validate the entire change from build to production.
• User-focused releases and minimized risk: Developers can connect their CI/CD pipeline directly to the customer experience to make releases user-focused, risk-free, and rollback-friendly.
• Increased code confidence: With automated release orchestration, teams will definitively know that their code is working as intended.
• Automated rollbacks: Manual rollbacks take 45 minutes to an hour. Automated rollbacks make the delivery process fast, efficient, and streamlined.
• Real-time service validation: Developers can safely release code to a controlled subset of real users in a live production environment to get immediate feedback on how code performs. Flexible subsets include internal testers, beta customers, or an external low-risk customer group of choice.
• Performance degradation prevention: Automate your release conditions and best practices into a release policy to act as guardrails. By automating software validation in production and rolling back releases when necessary, developers, operators, and customers are protected from performance degradation.

"If you look at every other deploy and release vendor on the market, they're built to service centralized release and operations teams who want tighter control over deploys," said Rob Zuber, CTO of CircleCI. "But this doesn't reflect the reality of elite software teams who depend on developers to drive and deliver fast innovation. Our approach to CircleCI releases provides a developer-centric workflow that enables them to ship faster and monitor new features in production coupled with the safety net of quickly rolling back releases if something goes wrong."

CircleCI releases is now available to all CircleCI users. To learn more or chat about how CircleCI can empower your team to deliver innovation faster, visit one of our experts at KubeCon EU, booth M16 from March 19-21, 2024. Get started using CircleCI releases today.

About CircleCI

CircleCI is a leading continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform, enabling more than two million global users on elite engineering teams like Okta, Hinge, and Hugging Face to rapidly build, test, deploy, and monitor software they can trust. Through powerful pipeline automation, CircleCI manages limitless complexity at scale through unmatched flexibility and reliability, reducing the time from build to delivery by 3x the industry average. For more information about CircleCI, visit www.circleci.com or follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube.