October 2018 Summaries

Harness integrates with JFrog Artifactory to streamline Continuous Delivery by reducing the complexity and manual effort associated with deployment processes, offering it as a turnkey service for DevOps and developers. While Continuous Integration has been largely solved by tools like Jenkins, the transition from artifacts to production remains challenging, often relying on cumbersome deployment scripts and manual oversight. Harness aims to address these issues by allowing dynamic deployment pipelines that promote artifacts across environments, facilitating the automation process and reducing the need for constant supervision. The integration with JFrog Artifactory, including support for large implementations, enables developers to build and manage deployment workflows efficiently, incorporating security scans and real-time monitoring. By leveraging these capabilities, developers can deploy and test independently, overcoming the hurdles of governance and capability in Continuous Delivery.

The SAX HMM machine learning model effectively identifies dissimilarities in time series data for canary analysis, demonstrating a 75% detection rate at m_max=5 and peaking at 93% with higher m_max values, thereby enhancing deployment reliability and risk assessment. The model is tested using a synthetic dataset inspired by the UCI Synthetic Control dataset, where time series data are analyzed to determine similarity or dissimilarity based on inferred deviation ranges. The methodology involves generating datasets with varying ranges of the parameter m, with each dataset comprising 30 time series, leading to 900 comparisons to detect dissimilarities. The results indicate that the detection rate of dissimilarities increases with m_max and stabilizes around 93%, confirming the model's effectiveness for canary analysis applications.

Integrating AWS CloudFormation and HashiCorp Terraform with Harness Infrastructure Provisioners allows for automated and scalable management of cloud-native applications, enhancing efficiency and reducing costs for development and engineering teams. This integration supports the automated provisioning and decommissioning of infrastructure, facilitating on-the-fly scaling and cost-effective on-demand computing. AWS CloudFormation and HashiCorp Terraform provide a unified language for defining and managing cloud infrastructure, with Terraform offering multi-cloud capabilities across AWS, Azure, and GCP. Harness's Infrastructure Provisioners enable the reuse, management, and orchestration of CloudFormation and Terraform scripts/templates within deployment workflows, ensuring synchronization with application-level changes. These provisioners can be added to deployment workflows for infrastructure setup prior to deployments or decommissioning post-deployment, with complete visibility into CloudFormation and Terraform execution for effective debugging and management. This integration is designed to be user-friendly and is available for trial on the Harness software delivery platform.