CircleCI finally open up to Windows devs

CircleCI finally open up to Windows devs
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The people behind continuous integration and delivery platform CircleCI today announced the addition of Windows to its Linux, Docker, and macOS spanning list of supported execution environments. 

Although most teams tend to stick to one execution environment during development (especially if it’s down to Windows vs Linux), having the ability to combine jobs for different platforms into one workflow can come in handy for testing and similar purposes. Windows jobs in CircleCI run in virtual machines to provide clean environments which in turn ensure the reproducibility of each build and data security. 

The new Windows environment also supports workflows based on Docker Engine – Enterprise and includes the usual CircleCI features such as approval jobs and contexts. 

According to the company’s VP of Product Matt Wyman, the offering was made possible by “Microsoft’s moves to open up their toolchain”. It helped CircleCI to put “a check on our to-do list” in regards to making the CI/CD process “scalable, performant, and intelligent”. 

Moving forward, CircleCI seeks to further this agnosticism and extensibility by spending time on orbs, as the product’s packages of configuration elements are called, and its API. “We are also investing heavily in resource classes, and pipeline and workflow flexibility, so that teams have as much power and control over their CI/CD process as possible” Wyman added.

The company also plans to have a look into the data they collected in the last couple of years and see how customers can profit from such insight. Or as Wyman put it “We have a wealth of data on how code moves from idea to delivery, and we plan to bring it to life.”

How this is going to look like isn’t really clear yet, although CircleCI’s CEO Jim Rose mentioned in a blog post last month, that “surfacing metrics like velocity and time to recovery can help teams find and fix problems quickly”, which could hint to more monitoring options.