March 2018 Summaries

Harness has introduced a Continuous Verification Dashboard designed to streamline the monitoring of deployment verifications, offering architects and engineering managers real-time insights into the success or failure of deployments. The dashboard, a response to customer feedback, provides a comprehensive view of deployment verifications over time, helping users quickly identify trends and root causes of failures without manual configuration. By leveraging machine learning, the system analyzes time-series metrics from APM tools like AppDynamics, New Relic, and Dynatrace, as well as unstructured log analytics from platforms such as Splunk and Sumo Logic. This feature allows users to pinpoint specific failed verifications and understand their business impact through a simple interface, enhancing the maturity of Continuous Delivery processes. Upcoming integrations with Datadog and Prometheus aim to further expand the tool's capabilities.

Twilio has integrated Split, a feature management platform, to enhance its experimentation capabilities, enabling faster and more data-driven product decisions. As Twilio sought to innovate in API services, they recognized the need for extensive product experimentation to inform decision-making and drive key metrics like sales and product adoption. After evaluating various options, Twilio chose Split for its flexibility, scalability, and ability to seamlessly integrate with their internal systems. Split's platform allows Twilio to run full-stack experiments, ensuring consistent user experiences and efficient data collection on feature variations. This adoption has allowed Twilio to conduct experiments significantly faster than if they had developed the platform in-house, while also enabling multiple teams to organize their experiments within a single environment. The use of Split provides Twilio with a robust solution for testing features in production and supports their internal experimentation needs, ultimately contributing to more efficient and informed product development.

Harness's new Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) feature provides granular permissions across deployment pipelines, enhancing security and ensuring separation of duties in continuous delivery environments. It supports flexible role assignments for different organizational needs, allowing DevOps teams to manage tooling, developers to deploy with controlled access, and security teams to audit deployments for compliance. The RBAC system enables detailed permission settings for various components like applications, services, and environments, and allows actions such as create, update, delete, and execute to be mapped to these components. This ensures that duties are clearly separated, with DevOps managing pipeline creation and developers executing deployments, while executives have read-only access for oversight. Harness also offers restrictions on cloud provider and tool usage to prevent unauthorized access, with future plans to integrate support for LDAP/AD/OKTA/SAML for user authentication and group mapping, enhancing the platform's flexibility and security.