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CircleCI automates Continuous Delivery to multiple clouds

Today's companies use CI/CD to speedily deploy software updates, but that last step, from your pipeline to a cloud service, can be tricky. CircleCI has an answer.
Written by Steven Vaughan-Nichols, Senior Contributing Editor
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Modern software development is fast, continuous, and automated. Today, by research company Statista's count, 88% of organizations are using Agile methods and Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD). Yet there remains one major stumbling block: Moving a freshly minted program from a CI pipeline to delivery to a cloud or other service provider. That's where DevOps company CircleCI comes in with a new suite of orb integrations with 20 partners such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, Salesforce, and others. These enable developers to automate remote deployments in minutes from their CI/CD pipeline. 

Orbs are CircleCI packages that fit into the end of the CI/CD software delivery automation workflows. They are "parameterizable" packages that condense commands, executors, and jobs into single, reusable lines of code. 

Now, in partnership with numerous cloud and service providers, the new orbs help automate deployments. It can take hours to write integrations to deploy to services such as AWS Elastic Container Service (ECS), AWS Serverless, or Google Cloud Run. Deployment orbs allow developers to deploy applications in minutes using a pre-packaged configuration. 

By simplifying and speeding up the process teams can ship new features faster than ever. For companies deploying to multi-cloud environments, this greatly reduces the work needed to move a program to two or more clouds. 

CircleCI currently has more than 116 certified and partner orbs from technology services such as Heroku, Kubernetes, and Helm, and over 1,200 total orbs listed in the CircleCI orb registry. 

Some of the most important of these orbs in this release are listed in the Continuous deployment with CircleCI orbs blog post. This includes orbs for AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, Cloud Foundry, Helm, and Red Hat OpenShift. 

CircleCI's partners are happy with the expansion of orbs. Rayn Veerubhotla, Google Cloud's Director of Hybrid Partnerships, said:  "Google Cloud Run helps developers run stateless containers and focus on writing high-value code, without worrying about the underlying infrastructure. By launching these new tools, CircleCI is enabling developers to further streamline and simplify their experience on Cloud Run, ultimately helping businesses bring new services and products to their customers more quickly."

The same is true of all the clouds that orbs are now supporting. If you find your CI/CD team slowed down by final step deployment issues, you should check this new offering out. It could save you time, work, and money.

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