CircleCI, a so-called DevOps platform for software innovation, announced today at Amazon Web Services Inc.’s re:Invent conference in Las Vegas the release of a variety of software integration “orbs” for AWS that provide simple, out-of-the-box solutions for building and testing code.

A CircleCI orb is a sharable package of configuration elements, including jobs, commands and executors designed to run as part of development and deployment workflow. DevOps is a method of software development that teams programmers and information technology operations staff to speed and improve software development.

This new suite of orbs released by CircleCI, formally known as Circle Internet Services Inc., will work on the AWS Serverless Application Model, also called SAM, using a new open-source framework for building serverless applications. This will allow DevOps teams to create automated continuous integration and delivery pipelines for testing and deploying to AWS Lambda, a serverless cloud computing environment.

This integration is the most sophisticated of its kind, claims CircleCI, and will allow developers to maximize efficiency when testing and delivering AWS serverless applications.

“Our suite of AWS orbs provides efficient solutions that can save developers hours of time setting up the integrations themselves,” said Kyle Tryon, community and partner engineer at CircleCI. “Where developers would normally need to learn the various commands and syntax required to configure, build, and push a container image correctly…you can achieve this same functionality with just half a dozen lines of pre-packaged config.”

Tyron offered the example of CircleCI’s Amazon Elastic Container Registry orb, which is currently used by more than 1,100 organizations, as one way developers could use an out-of-the-box configuration.

CircleCI orbs bundle configuration into reusable packages that enable users to perform thousands of use cases without the need for complex configurations.

Developers can deploy to AWS services with orbs that connect to AWS SAM Serverless, deploy and update the Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR), the Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) and the Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (Amazon EKS), and deploy applications to AWS CodeDeploy. It’s also possible to integrate with AWS services with orbs for installing and configuring AWS command-line-interface, Amazon S3 and the AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store.

“It’s been motivating to see so many teams benefit from our AWS integrations,” said Tom Trahan, vice president of business development at CircleCI. “We’re continually expanding and enhancing our AWS orbs to support the most popular use cases and to integrate with additional AWS services as our customers request them.”

The launches follow the one-year anniversary of the release of orbs, which were launched November 2018. Since launch, orbs have been widely adopted by CircleCI users, and have been implemented by more than 11 thousand organizations using orbs with more than 28 thousand repositories and 5.8 million continuous integration and deployment or CI/CD pipelines.

Image: CircleCI