February 2019 Summaries

Harness provides advanced support for blue-green deployment strategies on Amazon ECS, allowing for seamless updates and instant rollbacks with zero downtime. This is achieved through the use of Elastic Load Balancers (ELB) or Route 53 DNS updates, which enable businesses to test new versions without disrupting production traffic. Blue-green deployments involve two versions of an application: the "blue" version handles live production traffic, while the "green" version remains idle for testing. Once the new version passes verification tests, it can be rapidly swapped into production, with the flexibility to revert if necessary. Harness simplifies this process by managing listener rules and offering continuous verification using tools like Splunk and New Relic. This approach enhances operational efficiency and reduces deployment risks.

Harness has recently enhanced its platform by introducing several features aimed at improving deployment processes and visibility, including 24x7 Service Guard for continuous verification, Jira ticketing integration for pipeline tracking, and advanced alert management. These updates have enabled Harness to achieve approximately 1,500 deployments monthly across various environments. The 24x7 Service Guard offers developers comprehensive visibility of service performance, while the Jira integration facilitates tracking deployment activity. The new alert management system allows alerts on any event within Harness, assigned to specific user groups. Additionally, AWS CloudWatch Verification for Lambda artifacts has been updated to leverage AI for deployment success verification, and Harness now supports Blue/Green deployments for AWS ECS. Custom deployment workflows and artifact repository support have been introduced, allowing users to use their own scripts and webhooks. The platform also added a feature to view execution context variables, aiding in debugging and troubleshooting.