Intelligent automation and DevOps software delivery tools outfit CircleCI today announced an expansion of partner integrations intended to help developer teams better manage, build, test and release applications for Kubernetes environments.

Kubernetes is an open-source platform for orchestrating containers, which is a software deployment method that allows much easier management and production of applications at scale in multiple computing environments.

CircleCI uses Kubernetes to release what the company calls “orbs.” Orbs are packages that contain configuration, jobs, commands and execution software for builds and services.

“Our core focus at CircleCI is enabling teams to automate their build, test and release activities in order to deploy more frequently and with greater confidence, particularly as the pressure to deliver more and more software increases,” said Tom Trahan, CircleCI’s head of business development.

The new partner integrations include new orbs for AWS, Azure, VMware, Red Hat, Kublr and Helm, as part of CircleCI’s Technology Partner Program, which launched in November 2018.

“Kubernetes-based orb integrations from CircleCI and our partners enable customers to easily integrate with container registries, successfully manage deployments, and even provision Kubernetes environments on-demand,” said Trahan.

According to CircleCI, since the launch of the platform, orbs have been widely adopted by users with over 600 orbs published to the registry. The addition of more partners using Kubernetes will open up more cloud environments that orbs can be shared across. For example, using the platform it would be possible to publish services and keep the code configured and synchronized across AWS and Azure clouds at the same time — or even something slightly more simple like keeping separate regional data centers maintained without too much fuss.

Anubhav Sharma, vice president of customer success at Nirmata Inc., an enterprisewide Kubernetes management solution, said his company has benefited greatly from the partnership. “CircleCI and Nirmata provide customers with the ability to seamlessly automate their containerized application lifecycle management from development, deployment to operations and optimization, across any infrastructure,” said Sharma. “While CircleCI specializes in accelerating application development at scale, Nirmata provides customers with a single management plane to deploy and manage those applications in Kubernetes-based multicloud environments.”

Kubernetes platforms are now supported by CircleCI and partner orbs across numerous cloud providers. Developers interested in learning more about how to deploy and manage these integrations can read up on CircleCI’s blog.

Integration partners for services include Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes, Google Kubernetes Engine, Azure Kubernetes Service, Red Hat OpenShift, Kublr and Nirmata. Partners for registries and configuration include Amazon EC2 Container Registry, Google Cloud Registry, DockerHub and Azure Container Registry. Finally, partners for deployment capabilities include Helm, VMware CodeStream and DeployHub.

Image: Kubernetes