We are excited to announce our recent launch, designed to support release orchestration directly from within CircleCI.
The Release Agent can be installed in your Kubernetes cluster(s). Whether you need multiple agents in a single cluster or across various clusters, we’ve got you covered. Upon setup, the Releases UI provides a single location for organization-wide visibility into all your releases and statuses - no infra access needed.
You also gain a lot of control out of the box like manually restoring previous versions (rollback), scaling pods up or down, and restarting pods as needed.
To further enhance the experience, we chose to integrate with Argo Rollouts, which will give you additional capabilities to retry, cancel, and promote releases from the CircleCI UI and support canary deployments.
Here’s how it works:
Where we see this benefiting users:
We heard from customers that the end-to-end visibility into releases has been very impactful to both developers, support engineers, and even business leaders wanting to see how their teams are providing value to their customers.
Developers feel more confident being able to see what they’ve released and how it’s deploying, and the Mean Time To Recovery (MTTR) is significantly reduced by allowing support engineers to easily see what’s been recently released. And when issues arise, they’re able to easily address them without having to rely on the infra team.
What’s up next:
Our team is continuously working to enhance your experience and bring more functionality to our customers. You can stay up to date in our docs or our changelog, but some exciting features coming in the next few quarters are:
- Connect releases to your CircleCI workflows with release job types
- Guided release environment setup experience in the CircleCI web app
- Improved searching and filtering on the release dashboard
Our future roadmap items will focus on integration with ArgoCD, integration with AWS SageMaker, feature flags, and support for non-k8s environments.
If you have requests, input, or ideas, let us know here or on canny.
Conclusion
We want to hear from you! If you have questions, ideas, or suggestions we encourage you to reach out to your customer team, post in the thread below, or email us directly at feedback@circleci.com.