August 2020 Summaries

CircleCI is a shared continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform that has become an official technology partner of Humanitec, providing seamless integration with their Orb program. As one of the most-used DevOps tools, CircleCI offers unique access to data revealing how engineering teams work and how their code runs, used by companies like Intuit, Apple, Spotify, Tinder, and Twilio. The new Humanitec Orb allows users to easily integrate CircleCI pipelines with Humanitec workflows, reducing configuration complexity and enabling developers to write less custom code. Humanitec helps solve real-world problems by automating deployments, allowing developers to focus on writing code while minimizing time spent on environment management and setup. With the integration, users can pick up assets at the end of the CI/CD pipeline and deploy them to their cluster, managed through a single API and user interface.

Humanitec has announced full support for Automated Deployments, allowing teams to optimize developer productivity by automating their environments, reducing key person dependency, saving time, and minimizing errors. The new feature enables developers to define deployment rules that can be run based on triggers, providing flexibility in choosing what to deploy automatically and with what conditions. With this feature, users can track automated deployments in the deployment version history and maintain the option to deploy manually as needed, ensuring a smooth Continuous Delivery process.

I recently attended the virtual German Robotframework Online Konferenz 2020, where I gave a talk titled "Test automation in Kubernetes" to over 150 participants from the German Robotframework community. The talk covered the importance of Kubernetes for test engineers and demonstrated how an automation test suite can be executed inside a cluster using Humanitec. A live demonstration was also given to show the ease of setting up a test environment with Humanitec, allowing attendees to spin up a test environment under test conditions. I aimed to make the talk accessible by providing it in both German and English, although an English version is planned for future delivery.

Sandboxed testing environments help review UI changes or functionality changes, providing teams with the ability to test features in parallel without blocking static testing environments. They enable dynamic creation of environments that cover various combinations of feature flags and microservice versions, allowing for efficient testing and gathering feedback from different user groups. However, managing these environments can be complex due to resource utilization and cost considerations, requiring tools like Humanitec or infrastructure-as-a-service setups to streamline workflows and optimize costs.