Software:CircleCI

From HandWiki
Circle Internet Services, Inc.[1]
TypePrivate
IndustryCI/CD[2]
FoundedSeptember 1, 2011; 12 years ago (2011-09-01)[3]
FoundersPaul Biggar, Allen Rohner[3][4]
Headquarters
San Francisco[1]
,
United States of America
Key people
Jim Rose (CEO)[2]
ProductsCircleCI.com (Saas), CircleCI Enterprise (on-prem)
Number of employees
300 (2020)[4]
Websitecircleci.com

CircleCI is a continuous integration and continuous delivery platform that can be used to implement DevOps practices.[4] The company was founded in September 2011 and has raised $315 million in venture capital funding as of 2021,[3] at a valuation of $1.7 billion.[2] In 2021 CircleCI claimed they are the "largest shared CI platform".[5]

History

The company was founded in September 2011.[3] The product was first released for beta testing on October 11, 2011.[6] The first customers appeared three months after starting the company,[7] while it was 6 months before the first payment.[8] 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.[9]

In 2014, Paul Biggar left the company, but remained on the board.[7] The company grew quickly from 20 employees at the end of 2014 to 60 employees in summer 2016.[10]

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.[11] Another very similar logo to CircleCI's can be found in the 2017 film The Circle.

In October 2018, CircleCI became the first CI/CD tool authorized by FedRAMP.[12]

In August 2019 CircleCI made support for Windows builds generally available.[13] That same month, there was a data breach in a third-party analytics vendor account used by CircleCI.[14]

In November 2019 CircleCI opened an office in London.[15]

Financing

CircleCI has raised $50k from a small investor a few months after starting,[16] $1.5m in seed funding in 2013,[17][18] 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, a $56M Series D led by Owl Rock Capital and NextEquity Partners in 2019, a $100M Series E round led by IVP in 2020, and a $100M Series F round led by Greenspring Associates in 2021. In total this is $315 million in funding.[3][19][4][2][20]

Acquisitions

CircleCI acquired Distiller in 2014 and Vamp in 2021.[3][2]

Product

CircleCI monitors GitHub, GitHub Enterprise, and Atlassian Bitbucket repositories and launches builds for each new commit. CircleCI automatically tests builds in either Docker containers or virtual machines and deploys passing builds to target environments.[19] A dashboard and API allow tracking the status of builds and metrics related to builds.[21] A Slack integration notifies teams if issues arise.[4][22]

SSH support allows locally running jobs, and security measures prevent tampering.[19] CircleCI also offers a workflow approval feature that pauses the job(s) until manual approval is given.[23]

CircleCI supports Go, Java, Ruby, Python, Scala, Node.js, PHP, Haskell, and any other language that runs on Linux or macOS.[24]

The company offers a managed cloud service with a free tier available.[25] The platform can also be self-hosted on a private server.[26] The cloud service was initially written from scratch but now uses HashiCorp's Nomad and Kubernetes.[27]

CircleCI reduces risk by ensuring frequent testing and releases, and with the managed cloud service, takes care of CI infrastructure maintenance and provisioning.[10]

Orbs

Orbs are shareable snippets of YAML that can be used to simplify CircleCI builds and perform deployments.[2][28] CircleCI had integrations with 45 partners as of 2019.[19] 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.[29] In 2018 CircleCI's config.yml was the fastest growing YAML file on GitHub.[30]

Customers

Facebook, Coinbase, Sony, Kickstarter, GoPro, and Spotify use CircleCI.[19][2]

See also

References

  1. 1.0 1.1 "Contact Us" (in en). https://circleci.com/contact/. 
  2. 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 Sawars, Paul (11 May 2021). "Continuous software integration/delivery platform CircleCI nabs $100M". VentureBeat. https://venturebeat.com/2021/05/11/continuous-integration-and-delivery-platform-circleci-raises-100-million/. 
  3. 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 "Milestones" (in en). https://circleci.com/milestones/. 
  4. 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 Wiggers, Kyle (7 April 2020). "CircleCI raises $100 million for automated app testing and deployment". VentureBeat. https://venturebeat.com/2020/04/07/circleci-100-million-automate-app-testing-and-deployment/. 
  5. Rose, Jim (11 May 2021). "CircleCI acquires release orchestration tool Vamp" (in en). https://circleci.com/blog/vamp-and-circleci/. 
  6. "CircleCI on Twitter" (in en). https://twitter.com/CircleCI/status/123868492083630081. 
  7. 7.0 7.1 Kennedy, John (2 July 2018). "Going Dark: How Paul Biggar is building the future of software" (in en). Silicon Republic. https://www.siliconrepublic.com/start-ups/paul-biggar-dark-startup-grind-circle-ci. 
  8. Marks, Trisha. "Finding Product-Market Fit in Start-Up Marketing" (in en). https://www.properexpression.com/growth-marketing-blog/product-market-fit-start-up-marketing. 
  9. Harrison, Kim. "The Time Our Provider Screwed Us" (in en). https://launchdarkly.com/blog/the-time-our-provider-screwed-us/. 
  10. 10.0 10.1 "Make way for the modern continuous integration and delivery platform software teams love to use: CircleCI" (in en). The Silicon Review. https://thesiliconreview.com/magazine/profile/make-way-for-the-modern-continuous-integration-and-delivery-platform-software-teams-love-to-use-circleci. 
  11. Wieczner, Jen (February 19, 2016). "People are Accusing Uber of Stealing This Startup’s Logo". Fortune. http://fortune.com/2016/02/19/people-are-accusing-uber-of-stealing-this-startups-logo/. Retrieved 1 February 2017. 
  12. Sargent, Jenna (4 October 2018). "SD Times news digest: CircleCI authorized by FedRamp, KotlinConf announcements, and Google extends PyTorch support". SD Times. https://sdtimes.com/softwaredev/sd-times-news-digest-circleci-authorized-by-fedramp-kotlinconf-announcements-and-google-extends-pytorch-support/. 
  13. Speed, Richard. "They're climbing through the Windows: CircleCI goes native on Microsoft's OS" (in en). www.theregister.com. https://www.theregister.com/2019/08/07/circleci/. 
  14. Oates, John. "Today's data whoopsie is brought to you by CircleCI: Source safe, but look out for phishers" (in en). www.theregister.com. https://www.theregister.com/2019/09/05/circleci_security_incident/. 
  15. Speed, Richard. "The lure of Brexit Britain proves too great for DevOps pipeline wrangler CircleCI" (in en). www.theregister.com. https://www.theregister.com/2019/11/21/circleci/. 
  16. Biggar, Paul. "I founded CircleCI (valued at $1.7B) and Darklang. AMA!". https://www.indiehackers.com/post/i-founded-circleci-valued-at-1-7b-and-darklang-ama-a737b04438?commentId=-MgBk6Pjw_w0TxN-n8OD. 
  17. Biggar, Paul (25 February 2013). "So we raised a bunch of money" (in en). https://circleci.com/blog/so-we-raised-a-bunch-of-money/. 
  18. Darrow, Barb (25 February 2013). "CircleCI gets $1.5M to build out continuous integration service". Gigaom. https://gigaom.com/2013/02/25/circleci-gets-1-5m-to-build-out-continuous-integration-service/. 
  19. 19.0 19.1 19.2 19.3 19.4 Wiggers, Kyle (23 July 2019). "CircleCI raises $56 million to continuously test software builds for bugs". VentureBeat. https://venturebeat.com/2019/07/23/circleci-raises-56-million-to-continuously-test-software-builds-for-bugs/. 
  20. Tansey, Bernadette (17 January 2018). "Xconomy: CircleCI Nabs $31M to Enhance DevOps Platform With Automation Tools" (in en). Xconomy. https://xconomy.com/san-francisco/2018/01/17/circleci-nabs-31m-to-enhance-devops-platform-with-automation-tools/. 
  21. Riggins, Jennifer (8 April 2020). "CircleCI Insights Helps DevOps Teams Quantify High-Performance". https://thenewstack.io/circleci-insights-helps-devops-teams-quantify-high-performance/. 
  22. Rubens, Paul (June 21, 2016). "7 ways to get more from Slack". CIO magazine. http://www.cio.com/article/3086158/collaboration/7-ways-to-get-more-from-slack.html. Retrieved 1 February 2017. 
  23. Wainewright, Phil (7 January 2020). "How CircleCI speeds DevOps cycle times with CI/CD automation" (in en). https://diginomica.com/circleci-speeds-devops-ci-cd-automation. 
  24. "CircleCI Documentation". https://circleci.com/docs/. Retrieved 30 January 2017. 
  25. Dotson, Kyt (11 January 2022). "CircleCI is offering a new free CI/CD plan for DevOps teams with more features". SiliconANGLE. https://siliconangle.com/2022/01/11/circleci-offering-new-free-ci-cd-plan-devops-teams-features/. 
  26. "Pricing and Plan Information" (in en). https://circleci.com/pricing/. 
  27. Oliver, Kiran; Williams, Alex (16 November 2017). "CircleCI's Technical Architecture Is Built for Scalability". https://thenewstack.io/circieci-technical-architecture-build-for-scale/. 
  28. "CircleCI Developer - Orbs". https://circleci.com/developer/orbs. 
  29. "Configuring Deploys - CircleCI". https://circleci.com/docs/2.0/deployment-integrations/. 
  30. Francisco, Thomas Claburn in San. "Behold, the world's most popular programming language – and it is...wait, er, YAML?!?" (in en). www.theregister.com. https://www.theregister.com/2018/11/19/popular_programming_language_yaml/. 

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