Move fast and don't break anything: An interview with Cloud Awards winner CircleCI
“The next phase of software development hinges on the ability to move quickly without sacrificing reliability,” says CircleCI’s Nick Mills
The Cloud Excellence Awards traditionally kick off the tech industry's autumn/winter events season, with the result that they are always a large and inspiring affair. This year they were even more exciting than usual: the result of two years of pent-up demand for an in-person event.
CircleCI was the deserved winner of the prize for Most Innovative Cloud Product or Service - DevOps, and Nick Mills - the company's GM of EMEA - described receiving the award as a "collective honour" for the entire team.
Computing: How did you feel to be back at the Cloud Excellence Awards?
Nick Mills: Computing's Cloud Excellence Awards has always been a highly regarded event, recognising the very best of the UK's cloud industry. With dozens of categories and new ones added each year, it's a great source to find the most innovative and compelling products and vendors that are helping to support digital transformation projects and help empower the UK's next-generation digital businesses.
CTG: How did you feel when you heard that your entry had won?
NM: This is a collective honour for the entire team at CircleCI to be recognised alongside industry leaders like Confluent, Snap Logic, ThoughtSpot, and many others. Winning the ‘Most Innovative Cloud Product/Service - DevOps' category further validates our mission to provide a best-in-class CI/CD platform, finely tuned to solving one of the technology industry's biggest challenges in the testing and validation of software.
CTG: What do you think made your entry stand out?
NM: CircleCI is the leading continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform available today.
Our platform was built by a team of DevOps experts who understand how critical CI/CD is to your entire development process and your entire business. The best software teams know that speed, focus, and consistency of delivery make the difference between good and great. We built CircleCI to deliver on these promises so you can deliver on yours — to reliably bring only the highest quality products to your customers. With every industry increasingly driven by software, CircleCI's CI/CD platform has captured more market share with developers committing more than 3 million jobs per day.
Secondly, our dedicated focus on the developer and the industry means that we understand them in incredible detail. We also have more than a decade of experience and market intelligence, given the number of customers concurrently running builds; CircleCI has processed more than 22,800 years' worth of builds, with a recent report showing 80 per cent finishing in 10 minutes or less. In 2020 alone, CircleCI processed more than 6,000 years' worth of builds.
Getting here wouldn't be possible without our 600+ global employee base. We have the smartest minds 100 per cent committed to helping teams solve their most complex software delivery problems, and we'll only continue to grow.
CTG: What does the win mean for you, your team, and your organisation?
NM: Being recognised in this way is a cause for celebration and a huge boost for our employees. It helps to solidify our 10-year leadership in the CI/CD space and add to our continued momentum as we're planning, building, and hiring for the next 10.
CTG: What does the future hold - what are the priorities for the next 12 months?
NM: CircleCI has always put the developer first and will continue to do so as we move into the next phase of software development, which hinges on the ability to move quickly without sacrificing reliability. Our recent acquisition of release orchestration platform Vamp adds to the breadth of our capabilities. Growing in this direction means we can empower engineering teams to create and ship value to their customers at all stages of the software development lifecycle.
