Our mission at CircleCI is to manage change so you can innovate faster. In 2023 we released 50 new features and feature enhancements to help you do just that. CircleCI shipped 3.8x more releases this year compared to the average of our competitors. By the numbers, that’s twice as many CI/CD enhancements as GitHub or GitLab and orders of magnitude more than AWS, Bitbucket, Travis, or Bitrise.
From security enhancements to productivity tools to guardrails to keep your business safe, no CI/CD company works harder to keep your team working.
Security releases in 2023
This year we invested heavily in releases that strengthen your ability to stay secure in an ever-changing threat climate. Highlights include:
- We onboarded additional resources to strengthen our 24/7 security monitoring, alerting and incident response capabilities.
- Our OIDC functionality expanded continually over the year, including:
- An enhanced subject claim and a new SSH rerun claim allow customers to write granular access policies for tokens
- A newly customizable audience claim opened up new integration opportunities
- Tokens become available during pipeline spinup enabling the use of OIDC to pull from private image repos
- A dedicated OIDC for ECR command enables ECR connections with only 2 lines of config.
- We released tightened scoping for secrets (project environment variables based on
create and updated dates) as well as the ability to scope secrets down to individual projects.
- We made available additional APIs to support secret rotation.
- We released config policies:
- CLI & API which allows org admins to manage org-wide controls for resource class usage, allowed orbs, and fine-tuned context access
- Config policy CLI/UI allows developers to review company policies, test config changes for compliance, and resolve violations (GA in Cloud and in Server 4.3+)
- And we added additional functionality to our audit logs, including:
- New audit log events to help customers identify and respond to incidents (project API token creation, project env var creation and deletion, project settings)
- Updates on SSH key creation and deletion context accessed in pipeline
- A new self-serve UI for downloading audit logs via the web app
Productivity releases in 2023
In addition to security enhancements, we also released dozens of new features to help you build better and faster.
- Release environments give you visibility into your Kubernetes deployments from within the CircleCI web app. This feature is currently in open preview, and more deploy and release functionality is coming in the new year.
- Major improvements to the CircleCI VS Code extension adapt it to track any type of CircleCI project, no matter the VCS, and to support multi-project VS Code workspaces. It now offers an improved pipeline debugging experience through in-IDE test output reporting, job logs visualization, and re-running of jobs with SSH in one click. Since December, it also lets users test out config changes easily by triggering pipelines directly from VS Code, based on their local config files.
- A new UI for steps in the CircleCI web app makes step URLs clickable with more legible data output. The new UI is more robust and removes previous display limits for step data.
- We pushed numerous enhancements to container runner, improving the functionality of self-hosted runners installed in your Kubernetes cluster.
- We released M1 for Mac, offering performant resources with GPU access and allowing for full end-to-end testing. Additionally, M1 provides a powerful platform for your AI/ML projects.
- We enabled Arm support for the Docker executor.
- New GPU resource classes were released for customers on Scale plans, with the option of an AI add-on plan for added performance on MLOps projects.
- We began offering support for GitLab self-managed instances.
- We released the ability to rerun failed tests only, saving time and credits by only re-running tests that have failed.
- You can now leverage an AI-powered smart assist in generating config files, which can save time and simplify complex configuration tasks.
- Inbound webhooks allow you to trigger pipeline runs from a change in any source, including non-VCS sources.
- Error summarization speeds up debugging by AI-contextualization of, and solutions to, common errors.
- Server 4.x added support for industry standard Helm install and upgrades. With Server 4.3, a major change in the execution architecture expands the reliability and robustness of the platform.
Support improvements in 2023
- Investments in support resources and documentation began allowing customers to self-serve for straightforward issues like billing and linking/unlinking VCS accounts.
- The release of AI-powered error summarization as well as documentation improvements also kept customers in flow and more productive this year.
- These releases enabled the support team to focus on resolving more complex issues. Median time to resolution actually increased by 28% year-over-year, and this is a good thing!
Platform reliability improvements in 2023
Our work on our platform’s reliability has also paid dividends this year. After investments in incident tooling and processes, and re-architecting key parts of our platform, we’ve been able to meet our goal of increasing our resilience to keep you building at all times (read more about our reliability work here). In short, over the course of 2023:
- Critical path uptime went from 99.3% –> 99.9+% uptime
- Average monthly downtime reduced from 5hrs –> 43 minutes
- Number of long (60m+) incidents down by 50%
We know how vital the velocity, efficiency, and continuity of the software development lifecycle is to any business, and we thank you for trusting us to be a part of yours. We’re looking forward to the new capabilities our platform will enable for your team in 2024!
