Continuous integration and delivery platform for DevOps teams Circle Internet Services Inc. today announced the release of new secure and private configuration options known as “private orbs,” which are reusable packages that automate repeated processes.

CircleCI uses orbs across its entire framework to provide automated project setup for more than 10,000 unique organizations on a monthly basis with more than 2,000 orbs and the company says they’ve been integrated into more than 18 million continuous integration/continuous delivery or CI/CD pipelines.

However, many of these orbs are open source and publicly available on a public registry in order to make them as useful as possible at as wide a scale as possible. According to CircleCI, developer teams have been asking to be able to compile and keep their own orbs.

With private orbs, developers can privately share configuration across multiple projects exclusive to their organization.

A private orb would not appear on a public registry and would be accessible only within a select organization and therefore would be subject to access controls. As a result, they would also be useful for industries such as healthcare, finance and other industries with governance needs and compliance standards.

“As cloud adoption increases and security concerns grow, we believe that teams shouldn’t have to choose between speed or security,” said Jim Rose, CircleCI’s chief executive. “We empower them to have both by providing ways to create and manage reusable components, patterns, and processes.”

CircleCI is also sensitive to the fact that many teams are becoming more remote and further privacy tools are required to help control their environments. With the availability of private orbs at their fingertips, DevOps teams will be able to provide access controls to their configuration tools.

“CircleCI’s latest privacy tools will provide users with an efficient way to share their code and intellectual property across teams, while reducing the risk of revealing secrets and minimizing surface area for attack from bad actors,” said Rose.

The company also provides additional security features that DevOps teams can take advantage of to ensure that development pipelines are secure such as environment variables, multiple contexts and admin controls.

To assist teams with their delivery production, CircleCI now provides developers with access to private orbs with the ability to create private orbs starting today, allowing them to share configurations exclusively within their organizations.

Image: CircleCI