CircleCI unveils new features to its self-hosted runners

CircleCI announced new security and automation capabilities to its self-hosted runners.

Founded in 2011, CircleCI has always been at the forefront of software development. As the largest CI/CD platform serving thousands of companies across the globe, CircleCI empowers its customers to take ideas to execution, at scale, by fine-tuning the development process from start to finish.

CircleCI’s self-hosted runners bring CircleCI’s powerful cloud to any unique infrastructure or compliance use case, allowing enterprise-level teams or those in highly regulated industries the ability to build and test on a wider variety of architectures, as well as have additional control over the environment.

Many customers use CircleCI’s self-hosted runners to monitor and adjust their runner pools to match the demands of their cloud pipelines, make informed scaling decisions, and identify and remediate stuck jobs or failed infrastructure.

In addition, today self-hosted customers can take advantage of the following:

• Test splitting: Customers who use self-hosted runners can now take advantage of CircleCI’s parallelism and test splitting features. The more tests projects have, the longer it will take for them to complete using a single compute resource. To reduce this time, developers and their teams can split their tests and run them across multiple, parallel-running execution environments. Splitting tests intelligently and using parallelism saves time for developers and keeps them focused on building what matters most.
• Enhanced access and control: Customers can use additionally configured SSH keys for running processes on other services during job execution with add_ssh_keys. This is in addition to their ability to connect to private networks, deeply monitor their operating systems, apply restrictions using static IPs, and more.

“Being able to move quickly and reliably is no longer ‘nice to have’ but core to the responsibilities of today’s engineering teams,” said Jim Rose, CircleCI, CEO. “CircleCI’s latest additions will make it easier for enterprise-level customers or those in highly regulated industries to have deeper access to the most intelligent and performant CI/CD tooling on the market.”

These updates come on the heels of CircleCI’s introduction of a simplified self-hosted runner user experience by adding the ability for customers to download self-hosted runners in five minutes or less directly from the CircleCI user interface, in addition to adding self-hosted runner capabilities to all CircleCI plans, including the most generous free CI/CD tier for developers.