Today CircleCI, the leading continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) platform, announced the general availability of the CircleCI runner. 

The global challenges faced in 2020 have highlighted the competitive differentiator that well-oiled software delivery teams provide. Recent findings also point out that engineering teams who are resilient are more likely to outperform and scale above their competitors.

Achieving this, however, is especially taxing for teams limited by compliances, or deploying to specialized hardware or infrastructures. Self-hosted runners allow access to CircleCI's cloud to teams using their own infrastructure for running jobs. This means users can build and test on a wider variety of architectures, with added control over the security of their environments.

"It is common to find engineering teams across one company working within different environments and with different tools. Those who are in finance or healthcare may have to work behind a firewall, compared to product delivery teams who may be most efficient in the cloud," said Jim Rose, CEO, CircleCI. "Now, with CircleCI runner teams can get the control and flexibility they need to do both."

CircleCI's self-hosted runners provide: 

• Privileged access and controls. In order to confidently build, test, and deploy software, teams sometimes need to give jobs privileged access to private networks, static IP addresses or other special IAM permissions. Leveraging CircleCI cloud with self-hosted runners gives teams additional control over the security of the environment.
• The ability to run jobs on unique compute. Self-hosted runners provide the ability to build and test on a wider variety of architectures and environments. Teams who need to run jobs on hardware such as GPU machines, embedded systems, or IoT devices can use CircleCI runner to securely run these jobs with ease. 
• Support for Arm-based fleets. The CircleCI runner officially supports the Arm64 architecture on Linux, with plans to add additional supported platforms soon. 
  

"Using self-hosted runners for specific jobs is a great way to run sensitive CI/CD workloads without taking on the burden of significant in-house maintenance. Users can combine the runner with our cloud platform to get the scalability and world-class support of cloud while meeting strict security and compliance requirements," said Alexey Klochai, Product Manager, CircleCI.

Security and compliance have always been core to CircleCI, who in addition to releasing self-hosted runners recently achieved their SOC 2 Type II report. 

"Being SOC 2 compliant ensures safety for companies skeptical about the handling of sensitive information," says Tad Whitaker, Security Manager at CircleCI. "What this means for our users is that you're not just getting a CI/CD product. You're getting a quality CI/CD product from a quality team and well-trained employees and engineers to reinforce compliance."   

CircleCI has been recognized as a leader in The Forrester Wave: Cloud-Native Continuous Integration Tools, Q3 2019 for excellent marks in Forrester's compliance and governance criteria. Prior to SOC 2 Type II, CircleCI was the first CI/CD provider to become FedRAMP authorized, and is also compliant with the European Union General Data Privacy Regulation.

The CircleCI runner is part of a new Scale plan, tailored to meet the unique needs of enterprise software organizations.