July 2018 Summaries

Harness demonstrated the efficiency and scalability of its continuous delivery platform by migrating its infrastructure from AWS to GCP and adopting Kubernetes in under two hours. During a virtual presentation at Google Cloud Next '20, CI/CD Evangelist Ravi Lachhman and Engineering Manager Brett Zane-Ulman discussed the details of this cloud migration and how it marked Harness's first implementation of Kubernetes, highlighting their platform's capability to handle such transitions swiftly.

Transitioning from a monolithic to a microservices architecture allows developers to deploy directly to production with speed and safety, facilitated by Continuous Delivery, which integrates verification and rollback processes into the deployment strategy. Steve Burton explores the steps needed for a successful transition, including the necessary prerequisites for cloud migration and strategies to empower developers in this new deployment paradigm.

Ravi Lachhman, a CI/CD Evangelist, offers an expedited guide to mastering Kubernetes in 45 minutes, focusing on efficiently deploying containers, setting up clusters, and implementing canary deployments to enhance Continuous Delivery processes. The session covers fundamental aspects of Kubernetes, including container basics, the process of establishing an initial cluster, and the utilization of canary deployments to improve deployment strategies. This approach aims to significantly accelerate and optimize Continuous Delivery practices for teams.

Harness integrates with Kubernetes to enhance Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), providing streamlined deployment and management benefits that improve efficiency and scalability for businesses. CI/CD Evangelist Ravi Lachhman offers a summary of PaaS, examines the role of Kubernetes in this context, and explores the advantages of using Harness with PaaS to achieve these improvements.

Harness's Cloud Cost Management solution offers businesses an opportunity to substantially decrease idle cloud expenditures, as evidenced by customers achieving six-figure savings. The solution is demonstrated in a brief 5-minute demo, which highlights its effectiveness in managing cloud costs. Additionally, a free trial is available for those interested in experiencing the benefits firsthand.

Harness's integration with AppDynamics enhances the Continuous Delivery process by incorporating Continuous Verification, ensuring that software deployments are both efficient and reliable. This streamlined process is demonstrated through a concise 4-minute demo, which provides a walkthrough of how the Harness platform leverages AppDynamics to achieve these goals. The integration allows for the ongoing verification of deployments, a critical capability highlighted in an accompanying article that explains the importance of Continuous Verification.

Harness Continuous Delivery offers significant improvements in deployment efficiency, boasting a reduction in deployment times by over 80% and a decrease in Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR) by more than 90%. The company provides a brief five-minute demo to illustrate these benefits, appealing to potential customers who are short on time. Interested users are encouraged to sign up for a free trial to experience the product's effectiveness firsthand.

Ravi Lachhman, a CI/CD evangelist, emphasizes the importance of understanding the pre-deployment phase and source code management for optimizing CI/CD pipelines, which in turn enhances software delivery and deployment processes. He provides an overview of the activities and considerations that occur before software deployment, along with a summary of effective source code management practices.

Harness platform aims to improve Business Continuity Plans by filling in the shortcomings of traditional disaster recovery strategies, thereby enabling organizations to enhance their resilience and maintain operational continuity. CI/CD Evangelist Ravi Lachhman provides an overview of Business Continuity Plans, discusses the limitations of current disaster recovery plans, and explains how organizations can build greater confidence in their continuity efforts by utilizing the capabilities offered by the Harness platform.

Harness has introduced a Template Library feature to simplify Continuous Delivery by enabling teams to templatize and reuse scripts across deployment pipelines, which reduces setup time and promotes collaboration. The platform aims to streamline the deployment process, allowing developers and DevOps teams to focus more on writing software rather than deployment scripts by using "Smart Automation" to integrate various tools and environments quickly. As a Continuous Delivery-as-a-Service, Harness provides most of the needed functionality out-of-the-box, while still allowing customization for specific deployment needs. The Template Library facilitates sharing and reusing scripts, enhancing collaboration and knowledge transfer across teams, and includes features like marking deployments as events in New Relic through HTTP webhooks. The platform supports the use of variables to customize deployment workflows, and users can easily integrate their scripts into Harness deployment processes, making the setup straightforward and efficient.

Blue-Green Deployments are a strategy for seamless software updates that involve maintaining two identical environments, "blue" (staging) and "green" (production), to facilitate zero-downtime releases and easy rollbacks. This guide explains how to set up Blue-Green Deployments using Kubernetes and Harness, outlining a step-by-step process to create applications, services, environments, and workflows. Key steps include creating a new application and service, setting up a production environment, and configuring a Blue-Green Deployment workflow, which Harness simplifies with automated health checks and verification processes. The deployment process allows the traffic to be switched from the green to the blue environment once the new version is validated, with optional rollback procedures and templating options for reusability by different development teams. This setup enhances deployment efficiency by enabling continuous delivery while minimizing risks, and it supports automation and manual approvals for greater control over the release process.