What is CircleCI?
CircleCI provides a robust Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) platform designed to enhance the software development lifecycle. It facilitates automated testing for a wide spectrum of applications including mobile, web, API, serverless, and AI, enabling teams to develop and deploy with speed and confidence.
The platform offers comprehensive visibility from commit to production, along with progressive delivery features allowing for easy monitoring of changes and automatic rollbacks if needed. It responds automatically to changes in the application environment, and if it affect the app, CircleCI can trigger a pipeline from it.
Features
- Automated Testing: Supports various application types including mobile, web, API, serverless, and AI.
- End-to-End Visibility: Provides complete visibility from commit to production.
- Progressive Delivery: Monitors changes and allows for automatic rollbacks.
- Automated Triggers: Automatically responds to changes in the application environment.
- Flexible Usage-Based Pricing: Pay only for what you use with a credit-based system.
- Docker Layer Caching: Cache the individual layers of any Docker images built during your jobs.
- Self-hosted runner: possible to run jobs on your own infrastructure.
Use Cases
- Automating software builds and deployments.
- Testing mobile, web, and API applications.
- Monitoring changes and rolling back deployments.
- Managing deployments from one dashboard.
- Developing and deploying AI-enabled applications.
FAQs
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What are credits?
Credits are the currency of CircleCI. Credits are purchased up-front and are used to pay for CircleCI platform usage in real time. Platform usage consists of: Monthly active users, Compute time, Add-on features, Additional network & storage use. -
Do credits expire?
Credits on the free plan expire after a month and do not roll over. The Performance plan includes the 30,000 credits available to the Free plan; these expire and do not roll over month to month. Performance plan users may purchase additional credits at $15 for every 25,000 credits. Any paid credits roll over month to month, and expire after a year. Unused credits will be forfeited if the account subscription is canceled. -
What if I am building open-source?
CircleCI offers free access to compute time and resources for organizations on our Free plan. Open source projects can access up to 400,000 credits per month (equivalent to 80,000 build minutes) to use on Linux, Arm, and Docker. -
How is network egress measured?
Network egress is triggered by restoring caches and workspaces to self-hosted runners. Any egress triggered by our cloud executors is not passed on to the customer. -
How is Docker Layer Caching (DLC) charged?
Docker layer caching uses 200 credits per job run in a pipeline (equivalent to $0.12 per job run).
