Circle Internet Services Inc., an enterprise continuous delivery and integration platform for DevOps teams, today announced that support for Microsoft Corp.’s Windows jobs is now generally available.

This update adds Windows to the number of supported environments that CircleCI provides to developers and DevOps teams, which combine application developers and information technology operations staff in one group. By adding Windows, CircleCI is expanding the operating systems and execution environments to which teams can build and deploy, which currently include Linux, MacOS and Docker.

That allows teams to run jobs across multiple environments on a single workflow. As a result, teams can automate deployment methodologies without the need for manual customization and thus achieve easier development and faster deploy times.

According to a survey released in 2019 by Stack Overflow, a forum that caters to developer questions and answers, nearly half the respondents reported building on Windows environments, exceeded only by Linux. That makes Windows a primary execution environment for development.

“For the last few years, we have received an influx of interest from customers to build projects on Windows,” said Rob Zuber, chief technology officer at CircleCI. Engaging with the Microsoft ecosystem, he added, will help developers using Windows, Azure, .NET and other Microsoft technologies deliver software faster.

The benefits of CircleCI Windows support includes complete build isolation and full virtual machine support. As a result, every job uses a clean environment that is created at deploy time and is erased when the job completes, leaving behind no residual environment that can compete with or interfere with the execution of other jobs. That also ensures that builds are readily reproducible from source code and increases the security of code execution, data privacy and the maintenance of secrets by reducing opportunities for information leaks after a job is run.

Windows jobs will also have access to standard CircleCI features such as caches, Workspaces, approval jobs and Contexts, with the same level of support and user interface as any other execution environment. And the Windows environment on CircleCI will include support for Docker Engine Enterprise in order to facilitate container-based workflows. “As we improve our Windows solution we are also looking forward to furthering innovation in the Microsoft ecosystem,” said Zuber, who added that the launch of Windows support brings CircleCI closer to the company’s vision of “build anything, anywhere.”

“Building Python packages for machine learning is a process that can be quite resource-intensive,” said Michael Bravo, DevOps engineer at Samsung NEXT, a Samsung product group dedicated to creating entirely new software, services and platforms. “Before the advent of native Windows support within CircleCI, we had to work around and use manual test processes or unwieldy remote control schemes on external Windows VMs. Now that CircleCI added Windows support, our teams here at Samsung NEXT can use one central tool for increased visibility and speed in our DevOps workflow, with improved testing and deployment velocity.”

This announcement follows a $56 million Series D round raised by CircleCI last month. The company said the funding set the stage for even more upcoming product announcements.

Image: CircleCI