CircleCI today announced it is making it easier for DevOps teams to determine the amount of resources being consumed by its continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform to help make application development teams more efficient.
Kunal Jain, senior product manager for CircleCI, said via the application programming interface (API) that CircleCI exposes DevOps teams can now determine, for example, which workflows are taking the longest to run or what tests might be creating bottlenecks into the CI/CD pipeline.
Armed with that insight DevOps teams can also optimize how credits to employ the CircleCI platform are allocated across their DevOps teams, added Jain. That capability should make it easier for DevOps teams to predict how much they are spending per month to run their CI/CD platform, said Jain. Many more IT organizations may opt to access CI/CD platforms using a software-as-a-service (SaaS) approach that limits the need for them to invest in their own IT infrastructure or in some cases even manage the platform.
DevOps teams have always been sensitive to efficiency but given the current economic climate, minimizing costs is becoming a higher priority for many organizations. As such, DevOps teams need more insights into, for example, how to best break up workflows to keep CI/CD platform costs to a minimum, said Jain. In fact, Jain says the total cost of operating a CI/CD platform is likely to now play a bigger role in selecting a platform as IT leaders demand more visibility into DevOps processes.
Of course, some DevOps teams may find themselves competing for credits based on how efficient they are. Teams who are more efficient than others could also allow IT leaders to reallocate credits as they best see fit based on the progress being made. In a previous era where compute resources were largely considered to be a nominal cost, many DevOps teams may find access to IT infrastructure might no longer be taken for granted.
CircleCI claims it runs more than 30 million independent jobs run every month. The company last year committed to exposing more API endpoints to help DevOps team better understand the languages, architectural patterns, code testing patterns, delivery success rates and team practices being employed. Like most providers of CI/CD platforms, CircleCI has made a commitment to making available a much broader range of actionable insights to DevOps teams via its API.
At this point, it’s unclear what the impact the economic downturn brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic might have on DevOps adoption. Undoubtedly, many organizations will put a hold on some application development projects as they reassess their priorities. On the other hand, with more people working from home, digital business transformation initiatives that require new applications are likely to become a higher priority as organizations seek to reinvent how they engage their end customers. Those projects may even be accelerated as part of a larger business continuity strategy. Regardless of the number of application development projects being launched, the scrutiny of how IT resources are being allocated and consumed is about to increase substantially.
