Today’s “ecosystem approach” to software building relies on various third-party and open-source dependencies.

Ultimately, this means that organizations and developers no longer control many application inputs and services. The quandary is that those inputs and services are changing all the time — and if (and when) they break, they break for everyone.

This has given rise to continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, which help software teams release code more quickly and increase productivity.

“In a world increasingly built on code, it’s important that software teams have the tools they need to build, deploy, and manage their workloads with confidence,” Tom Trahan, VP of business development at CI/CD platform CircleCI, told SDxCentral.

With increasing demand from the DevOps community for partner integrations, CircleCI today announced a new integration with SaaS-based data analytics platform Datadog.

With the new integration, “our mutual customers can optimize their workflows by detecting and resolving error-prone jobs and flaky tests that can cause build errors,” said Alex Vetras, Datadog senior product manager.

Simply explained, a CI/CD pipeline is a set of automated processes that run when changes are introduced in a company’s technology. This is most often due to changes made to source code, Trahan said.

CI automates the building and testing of these changes, and CD ensures that software and hardware changes are prepared, deployed and released, he said.

“Pipelines can be simple, executing a handful of jobs,” said Trahan, “or complex, with dozens or even hundreds of jobs automatically triggered and orchestrated in response to a change.”

With organizations demanding more efficiencies from their DevOps teams, the CI tools market continues to expand: Valued at $802.2 million in 2021, it is projected to reach $3.76 Billion by 2030, representing a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 18.74%.

“The reason that CI/CD has become increasingly important is that winning businesses are now defined by how effective and fast-moving their software teams are, but the world they operate in has become more complex,” said Trahan. “CI/CD pipelines enable these companies to stay on top of changes and avoid unexpected issues.”

CircleCI’s platform responds to changes that have occurred in a company’s technology environment with automated processes and activities, Trahan said.

For example, if source code is changed in a software repository on a supported version control system (VCS), that code change triggers automated builds, tests and deployments that occur on infrastructure managed by the platform and with pre-installed software ready to go.

“If a pipeline fails, teams are immediately alerted and can quickly remediate the error before it reaches customers,” said Trahan.

From a security standpoint, a CI pipeline is one of the best places for developers to add security mechanisms, he said.

“These days, instead of having just a firewall or outer security edge, most organizations build in multiple defense layers to minimize security risk,” said Trahan.

Pipelines can include many fully automated protective measures such as static and dynamic security scans and container vulnerability checks.

Trahan pointed out that, while CI/CD pipelines are critical to achieving speed and efficiency, vulnerabilities in the systems can compromise an organization’s environment — which is why it’s important for teams to monitor and audit their pipelines to ensure that they are secure and work as expected.

Founded in 2010, Datadog offers an observability service that consolidates metrics, traces and logs (what it calls its “three pillars”). The company competes in an estimated $2.17 billion market with the likes of Chronosphere, Dynatrace and New Relic.

With the new integration, organizations can bring event data occurring within their CI/CD pipelines together with their Datadog reporting and dashboards, Vetras explained. This can make it easier to detect and resolve error-prone jobs and “flaky tests that can cause errors,” he said.

“Effective CI/CD pipelines are critical to an organization’s ability to release new features and bug fixes,” said Vetras.

Trahan pointed out that, “CircleCI continues to see high demand for more partner integrations as software teams look to improve their capabilities with more choice and flexibility.”

He added that CircleCI looks to partner with companies focused on improving developer productivity and time-to-market. “We prioritize our partnerships based on the needs of our customers and are always looking for ways to integrate with technology providers that developers love.”

CircleCI launched 26 new technology partnerships and integrations in 2022. These include integrations with 1Password, GitLab, AWS, Arm and New Relic. Today, it has partnerships with more than 150 technology companies, and says that its partner library is larger than any other CI/CD platform on the market.

The CircleCI integration is now available on the Datadog marketplace.