Changelog

Orbs are the leading method to abstract away shared aspects of your pipelines. They make it possible to simplify the complex, share, and maintain jobs and commands across your organization. For large organizations, private orbs cab provide efficiency and scale.

Orb security settings now allow organizations to enable only private orbs. Previously orb settings required enabling uncertified orbs in order to enable private orbs. This prevented some organizations, whom were concerned about uncertified orb security, from benefiting from the private orbs.

For more information on orbs and creating your own private orbs see our documentation.

With CircleCI’s Evals orb 1.x.x, users were able to configure CircleCI to orchestrate evaluations of their LLM-enabled applications within their CI pipeline.

Evals orb 2.0.0 builds upon version 1.x.x, introducing Evaluation Testing. With Evals orb 2.0.0, users are able to automate the entire process of running evaluations, reviewing evaluation results and determining whether results meet application performance criteria. This removes the need to manually trigger evaluations and manually review evaluation results. Automating evaluations with CircleCI enables developers to automatically determine whether or not to merge proposed changes, or deploy their AI application.

To use Evaluation Testing, users configure test cases to determine if the results of an evaluation meet specified conditions. Each test case represents a scenario with an assertion to check if a specified condition is true or false. If any test case fails, the evaluation test fails. You can configure test case assertions such as Thresholds (Check whether 1 or more results fall within a range), and Equality (Check whether results provide an expected answer)

Evaluation Testing results are presented in the CircleCI web UI in two locations:

1. In the step details
2. In the tests tab

The official CircleCI Evals Orb makes it easy to integrate LLM evaluations into a CI pipeline, and to review evaluation results without context switching. The output of evaluations run through the Evals Orb is stored in CircleCI, and is accessible as a job artifact and as a PR comment added automatically by CircleCI.

Currently, the Evals Orb exposes commands to run evaluations through two popular LLMOps tools: LangSmith and Braintrust. If your evals leverage a different tool, let us know at ai-feedback@circleci.com. You can also contribute directly to the official Orb, by opening a PR on the public repository.

More resources on evaluating LLM-enabled applications are available in our documentation.

Users can now orchestrate their model deployments across multiple environments through the Amazon SageMaker Orb. They can also track and manage their deployments from within the Releases UI.

See our documentation for more information.

What’s New

A bug has been fixed in the circle-android utility in the machine image used in the Android orb, where the wait-for-boot step would hang.

The Android cimg and machine images will both be built using Ubuntu Jammy 22.04 in the near future.

Visit the Discuss post for more information.

What’s New

The orb source, orb info, and orb/config validate CLI commands have been updated to work successfully with private orbs.

While the orb source and orb info commands operate the same as they do for public orbs, the orb/config validate command is different.

For more information on how to use the updated orb/config validate tool, please refer to the Private Orbs technical documentation.

What’s New

We have made some exciting updates to our free plan, including giving teams more build minutes and access to our most popular features formerly only available on paid plans.

Some features on our new Free plan include:

• Up to 6,000 build minutes per month. Choose the right resource class size (S-L) to optimize for speed and power, or to maximize your build minutes.
• Unlimited users. CI and CD work better with a team; bring everyone on board easily.
• The largest free resource classes on Docker, Linux, and Windows so you can choose the right compute for any job.
• Increased concurrency limits: now up to 30x on Linux, Arm, and Windows.
• Streamlined collaboration with private orbs: shareable CircleCI configuration packages.
• Security. Our top priority is protecting our users’ intellectual property and sensitive secrets such as keys, tokens, and credentials. Rest easy with a suite of security features and compliance certifications, including FedRAMP and SOC 2 Type II.

You can learn about the of the changes here:

• CircleCI Blog - https://circleci.com/blog/most-generous-free-cicd-plan/
• Technical Documentation - https://circleci.com/docs/credits/#free-plan

What’s New

You can now interact with private orbs via the CircleCI web app. A list of your organization’s orbs has been added on the Organization Settings page, and new private orb details pages that open in the orb registry have also been added as part of this release. The orbs list shows all public and private orbs authored by your organization / in your organization’s namespace(s), while the private orb details pages open in the Orbs registry and are flagged with a new “private” badge. Please note you will only be able to see these pages if you are logged in and authenticated; if you are not logged in, you will receive a 404 error.

With this update, you may select your preferred way to interact with orbs, which can be either the CircleCI CLI or the CircleCI App, while also being able to easily share private orb information with other users in your organization.

Note: This update will not add private orbs to the searchable Orb Registry, and un-published orbs will not have linked details pages.

What’s New

Many customers have been asking for an easy way to manage the orbs they’ve authored, both public or private. To meet this need, we are rolling out a set of orbs usability enhancements inside the Circle app.

The first feature enhancement is a new orbs list that is available in Organization Settings. You can now see all orbs created by your organization along with key stats such as version, type, and usage.

Several new features have been released to improve the user experience when setting up configurations.

What’s New

Configuration sandbox

We have shipped a configuration sandbox so you can get immediate feedback while building your configuration. In this new experience, you can see the effect of your configuration change in a sandbox environment and offer corrections in the context of CircleCI configuration to get up and running faster.

Guide me - with orbs

We know users enjoy using orbs, therefore, we have made it easier to use and build a configuration with orbs. For new users, you will be able to walk through a series of steps that will take you through constructing a configuration using orbs.

Project setup for users w/existing configurations

We have made it easier for users who are ready to go and just want to build their projects on CircleCI. With this update, users now have the option to directly commit from any branch.

What’s New

Previously available to all of our Scale plan customers, we are now allowing all paid customers to access up to 3 Private Orbs. Note that Scale Plan customers will still have full access to an unlimited number of private orbs.

CircleCI orbs, launched two years ago, have helped users simplify their entire development process. However, we realize that many developers may want to share configuration provately across multiple projects, exclusively within their organization and not to the entire world. Private orbs enable you to share these orbs within your organization.

For more information on private orbs, refer to the technical documentation, which can be found here

What’s New

Some notable updates have been made to our sample configuration templates.

The top five most popular sample configuration templates (.NET, Android, Maven (Java), Node, Python) have been updated. These updates include:

• Updated to version 2.1
• Included orbs when applicable
• Added comments for education and learning
• Provided a more robust display of CircleCI concepts like workflows, jobs, steps
• Six Node sample configs are now displayed which meet different goals (either from orbs or custom config), instead of only showing one that is generic to that language

Finally, we have updated discoverability and access to these sample configs by hosting them in a modal instead of dropdown. The improved card layout and addition of content makes choosing a sample config simple and easy.

What’s New

Dynamic config via Setup workflows is now generally available for customers to use CircleCI jobs to generate pipeline parameters and configurations. These generated parameters and configurations are appended to the existing pipeline and enable customers to dynamically generate configurations based on runtime inputs. Since this functionality is already used in existing workflows/jobs structure, orbs can be used as part of setup workflows, which will enable you, and the community at large, to cover different dynamic configuration use cases by building orbs for different use cases.

One specific use case that has been enabled by setup workflows is path filtering, where you can determine which workflows should be run based on which files are modified (determined via a set of Git operations in a script). This is a key feature if you are using monorepos and will help you optimize your build processes. An orb also been developed to assist you in enabling path filtering.

For more detailed information about Dynamic Configurations, please refer to our product announcement, which can be found here.

For information on getting started with this feature, go to the product documentation, which can be found here.

What’s New

Previously, CircleCI orb version badges were generated through shields.io, with data provided by a small service that a CircleCI CPE member managed. Although this process was not officially managed by CircleCI, with this update, this feature now consolidates the entire orb version badge generation process within CircleCI.

For more detailed information about this update, refer to the Orb Version Badge discuss post.

Note: While this update has been available for a while, we have purposely limited promotion to enable us to monitor this update closely.

What’s New in Release 3.0.0

Server 3.0 is now generally available. The newest version of server offers the ability to scale under heavy workloads, all within your own Kubernetes cluster and private network, while still enjoying the full CircleCI cloud experience. Server 3.0 includes the latest CircleCI features, such as orbs, scheduled workflows, matrix jobs, and more. For existing customers interested in migrating from 2.19 to 3.x, contact your customer success manager. Server 3.0 will receive monthly patch releases and quarterly feature releases.

New Features

• New UI
• Orbs for Server
• Pipelines
• Config 2.1
• API 2.0
• Scheduled Workflows
• Matrix Jobs
• And much more…

Known Issues

• No support for external data stores (Postgres, Mongo, Vault). This feature will be implemented in a future release.
• It is currently possible for multiple organizations under the same CircleCI server account to have contexts with identical names. This should be avoided as doing so could lead to errors and unexpected behavior. This will be fixed in a future patch release.
• CircleCI 1.0 builds are not supported. If an attempt is made to run a 1.0 build, no feedback will be available in the application to indicate the cause of the issue. If a build is run on your installation and does not show up in the CircleCI application, users should be directed to use the CircleCI CLI to validate the project configuration and get details of the possible cause of the issue.
• CircleCI currently assigns a public load balancer for the frontend services. For some customers, their infrastructure or security groups won’t allow this. We will provide an optional internal local balancer for the frontend services in a future release.
• Telegraf metrics collection customization is not yet available.
• Support for GPU builders is not yet available.

To learn more about Server 3.0 installation, migration, or operations please see our documentation.

What’s New

Today we are enabling private orbs for our Scale customers.

Two years ago, open-source orbs were launched, helping users to simplify their entire development process. However, we also knew that many developers wanted to privately share configurations across multiple projects, exclusively within their own organization. Private orbs enable users to create orbs specific to their organization without exposing sensitive data or content to users outside of that organization.

You may now create, publish, and update private orbs via your organization’s admin. These private orbs will be restricted to, and accessible by, all users within the organization, and can be listed and imported into a config.yml file directly from the CircleCI CLI.

For more information about private orbs, refer to the Circle CI orbs documentation, which can be found here.

What’s New

Orb elements can now be composed directly with elements of other orbs. For example, you can now have an orb that looks like the following:

orbs:

  some-orb: some-ns/some-orb@volatile

executors:

  my-executor: some-orb/their-executor

commands:

  my-command: some-orb/their-command

jobs:

  my-job: some-orb/their-job

  another-job:

    executor: my-executor

    steps:

      - my-command

          param1: "hello"

What’s New

Orbs are packages of CircleCI configuration shared across projects. Orbs help you simplify YAML configuration, enable you to build on top of CircleCI, and support sharing of standardized configurations across your projects.

This release provides you with access to certified orbs for AWS CodeDeploy, Rollbar, Artifactory, CodeCov, Heroku, Slack and more. You can also create and publish your own orbs using the CircleCI CLI. Refer to the CircleCI Orbs Registry for the complete list of certified orbs.

To learn about using and creating orbs, see the following documentation:

• Introduction to Orbs
• Using Orbs
• Creating Orbs
• Orbs FAQs

What’s New

• The CircleCI CLI command orb list now has an optional flag, --json, that provides machine-readable output. In addition, the CLI command orb source has been updated to allow you to pull any version, including dev versions, for example:

circleci orb source mynamespace/myorb@dev:foo
circleci orb source mynamespace/myorb@1.2.3
circleci orb source mynamespace/myorb@volatile

• Cloud Performance plans have been updated to display multiple periods of usage data on the Settings page.

• The CircleCI API documentation has been re-published with a completely new design and updated content, see the API Reference.