November 2019 Summaries

Harness has introduced a new Pipeline Governance feature to ensure compliance with regulatory and operational standards such as PCI, HIPAA, and SOX within software development. This feature allows managers to score deployment pipelines based on weighted tags that represent different compliance standards, ensuring that pipelines meet necessary regulations before approval. The scoring system assigns weights to tags, impacting the overall compliance score, which helps in determining whether a deployment can proceed. Users can apply tags at various stages of a pipeline to represent compliance standards, and the governance standards can be customized and associated with specific applications. Additionally, recent updates include support for the latest Elasticsearch release, enhanced workflow verification, and Service Guard features, as well as the ability to disable or conditionally execute pipeline stages. Harness also encourages users to share unique tips and tricks for using the platform, offering a gift card as an incentive.

Harness highlighted its integration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) at re:Invent 2019, emphasizing the value of elastic infrastructure and agility in software development. The event, attended by over 65,000 participants, underscored AWS's evolution from its early days with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) to becoming a vital component for managing large-scale traffic events, such as those seen in eCommerce. The blog post reflects on the ongoing transformation in the cloud landscape, including AWS's push into data centers with solutions like Amazon Outposts and the rise of in-browser Integrated Development Environments (IDEs). As AWS continues to expand its offerings, re:Invent 2019 was anticipated to feature numerous sessions and updates, with Harness actively participating through events, demos, and discussions to showcase its capabilities in enhancing cloud infrastructure management.

Harness employs its 24/7 Service Guard and machine learning technology to monitor and address production anomalies rapidly, exemplified by resolving incidents within 18 minutes. They have been deploying to production daily for years, aiming to lead by example in Continuous Delivery. Harness emphasizes automation and monitoring to maintain high deployment speed without overwhelming their on-call team. They acknowledge that simulating production environments in QA is often impractical for complex applications, but their Service Guard product is designed to identify and fix issues quickly. The platform collects various application signals, such as transactional, JVM, and database metrics, and employs a color-coded heatmap to indicate risk levels. Integration with providers and notification systems like Slack and PagerDuty enables prompt incident resolution, demonstrating Harness' commitment to "move fast, but fix faster."

WebAssembly is emerging as a transformative technology for executing server-side languages directly in web browsers, which could reduce the need for remote calls and enhance processing efficiency. The technology offers a shift in where processing occurs, moving traditional server-side operations to the client-side, potentially leading to a new form of serverless computing. Despite its potential, WebAssembly is still evolving with limitations and security concerns reminiscent of past technologies like Adobe Flash and JAVA Applets. The LLVM support allows a wide range of languages, such as Go, Rust, and OCaml, to be utilized in WebAssembly, broadening its application scope. Tools like the Harness Platform facilitate the compilation and testing processes for WebAssembly, and as the technology matures, it promises to redefine the role of web browsers in application development.