February 2022 Summaries

Harness Dashboards is a customizable dashboarding solution designed to enhance data-driven decision-making by providing stakeholders with role-specific views of actionable insights across various modules, thereby improving productivity and operational transparency. Users can build custom dashboards by utilizing out-of-the-box templates or creating them from scratch, allowing for the addition of custom tiles with relevant metrics, the configuration of layouts, and the integration of global filters for context switching. These dashboards support advanced reporting and alerting functionalities, enabling users to be notified when certain conditions are met. The flexibility of Harness Dashboards empowers users to create tailored views, fostering transparency and effective decision-making, while allowing for the export of dashboards into formats like PDF and Excel for broader collaboration and analysis.

Harness GitOps enhances traditional GitOps by providing enterprise-grade features such as centralized dashboards for visibility, integrated Open Policy Agent (OPA) governance for security, and advanced controls to support efficient and secure DevOps scaling. This approach allows organizations like United Wholesale Mortgage and Sysdig to improve deployment velocity while mitigating downtime risks through features such as drift detection, application synchronization, and cluster reconciliation. By using Git as a single source of deployment truth, Harness GitOps offers developers the confidence to deploy at scale, with the ability to manage from a central location, perform rollbacks, and utilize machine learning-driven continuous verification to automatically detect and correct bad deployments. The introduction of enterprise features aims to transform how companies view and implement GitOps, helping them meet growing developer demands with greater control and efficiency.

Split is a SaaS company that provides a feature management tool designed to enhance the software development process by decoupling release from deployment, enabling engineering teams to release features more quickly and with greater control. The platform utilizes feature flags, also known as toggles, to allow developers to activate or deactivate features for specific user segments without affecting the entire user base, offering flexibility for tailored user experiences. Split differentiates itself by leveraging data from various sources to define customer experience metrics and facilitate experimentation through progressive delivery, which integrates feature flags into continuous integration and delivery workflows. This approach not only allows for targeted feature testing and A/B testing but also offers mechanisms such as kill switches for swift incident resolution. While Split provides robust data integrations and a clean user interface, some advanced features are only available at higher pricing tiers, and it lacks integration with CI/CD pipelines compared to competitors like Harness.

Harness recently celebrated its top performers from various roles and regions, highlighting their significant contributions to the company's innovation, customer success, and team collaboration. Emphasizing its core values, Harness acknowledges achievements both big and small, encouraging recognition tied to purpose and appreciation. Monthly, the company honors the "Top Canaries" during All Hands calls, while semi-annually, it recognizes the top 5% of global talent at its Company Kick-Off Meeting. This recognition includes employees such as Abby Haan, who excelled in content creation and brand expansion, Andrew Ziverts, who achieved top sales goals, and Anjan Balgovind, who demonstrated prowess in software development. The company also acknowledged other key contributors like Cristina Valdes, Dave Johnston, and Gabriel Cerioni, among others, each demonstrating excellence and dedication in their respective fields. Harness invites potential candidates to join its team and stay connected through its LinkedIn Talent Community.

Harness Feature Flags has introduced public-facing REST APIs, enabling developers to manage feature flags entirely through code, which enhances the efficiency of feature management processes by supporting automation for feature rollouts and progressive delivery. This development caters to developers and platform engineers who prefer working in code over using a UI, allowing them to create, edit, and manage feature flags programmatically. The API integration simplifies the management of feature flags, particularly in scenarios involving large numbers of flags or complex processes, by enabling automation and reducing manual effort. This approach aligns with Harness's developer-first ethos and offers significant time and stress savings for teams, while also allowing for scalable management of feature flag lifecycles. Existing users of Harness Feature Flags can access detailed documentation on the new APIs, and new users can sign up for a free trial to explore its functionalities.

The Harness Relay Proxy offers enhanced network security and operational efficiency by caching feature flag data internally, allowing client SDKs to fetch updates without making direct outbound connections to the Harness platform. This proxy, a lightweight Go application, operates within a user's infrastructure to manage streaming connections, making it particularly appealing to large or security-focused organizations by reducing network traffic and external dependencies. It supports multiple environments and projects, serving as a direct connection replacement, and provides high availability by caching all flag data, ensuring continuity even if connectivity issues arise. The proxy is especially beneficial in scenarios where reducing external connections is crucial, though it may not be necessary for smaller enterprises. While there is no additional cost for the proxy beyond regular subscriptions, users must account for operational and setup costs. Transitioning to the proxy from a standard deployment is straightforward, requiring only configuration changes, and can be done gradually to evaluate its benefits.

Harness successfully optimized its CD Community Edition to run on personal laptops with just 3 GB of memory and 2 CPUs, enabling up to eight concurrent deployments. This was achieved by reducing the memory footprint from 12 GB to 3 GB through detailed memory profiling, heap usage reduction, thread count optimization, and switching garbage collection algorithms. Initially, the memory usage for the 12 microservices was dominated by four Java-based services that consumed the most memory, necessitating a decrease in their individual memory requirements from 2.75 GB to 600 MB. Key strategies included optimizing heap and thread usage, reusing Redisson clients, binding executor services, and reducing the number of threads for cron jobs. Additionally, the garbage collection algorithm was switched from G1GC to Serial GC to accommodate the limited CPU resources, while tiered compilation was disabled to conserve memory. These changes successfully reduced the NG Manager service's memory usage to 600 MB, with similar reductions achieved for other services, ultimately allowing the Community Edition to operate efficiently on lower-spec hardware.

Kubernetes, an open-source container orchestration platform, has revolutionized DevOps by automating the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications, but improper configurations can lead to significant issues in production environments. Common mistakes such as ignoring health checks, misusing the 'latest' tag, mounting host file systems in containers, deploying to the wrong node, and failing to set resource limits can impact application reliability and increase costs. Employing proper deployment strategies like Blue-Green, Canary, and Rolling updates, alongside stateful and stateless containers, enhances operational success. Additionally, integrating monitoring, logging, and security configurations is vital for maintaining application performance and safeguarding data. Understanding Kubernetes' architecture, which includes master and worker nodes, and using tools like RBAC for security, can prevent deployment errors, ensuring efficient cluster management and high availability.

Modern software delivery emphasizes the necessity for faster release cycles, enhanced quality, and integrated security, driven by agile methodologies, microservices, and continuous integration and deployment. As software becomes increasingly integral to everyday life, organizations face pressure to adapt by redesigning their software development life cycles and adopting practices like cloud migration, DevOps, and DevSecOps. Key goals include improving velocity, governance, quality, and efficiency, which require a data-driven approach and agile frameworks to iteratively enhance software development. Best practices include using feature flags for rapid iteration, embracing microservices for flexibility, implementing rigorous testing and continuous integration, and incorporating security throughout the development process. The shift left mentality, which emphasizes early integration of testing and security, helps reduce long-term risks and costs. Moreover, the effective management of software development tools and fostering a positive organizational culture are crucial for maintaining productivity and innovation. Continuous improvement is vital, with success measured against industry standards and internal benchmarks.

Harness' custom dashboards offer organizations the capability to monitor, analyze, and visualize key performance indicators, enhancing software delivery efficiency and decision-making processes. By supporting both pre-built and customizable dashboards, the platform allows for the tracking of DORA metrics and other critical data, promoting a data-driven approach to improve software delivery and manage infrastructure costs. The dashboards provide visibility into software performance by capturing data across various systems, facilitating collaboration and effective benchmarking. Harness emphasizes both objective metrics, like lead time and deployment frequency, and subjective intangibles, such as team interactions, to assess software delivery performance comprehensively. The platform's self-service dashboard capabilities allow engineers and executives to track and benchmark key metrics, identify bottlenecks, and make informed business decisions. With ongoing updates, Harness aims to offer end-to-end visibility across its modules, including Continuous Delivery, Continuous Integration, Feature Flags, and Cloud Cost Management, ensuring robust software delivery management.

Split's engineering and product teams leverage feature flags extensively to enhance operational efficiency and foster innovation by enabling practices such as progressive rollouts, entitlement gating, and infrastructure migration. The use of feature flags facilitates testing in production, allowing new features to be deployed without user access initially and gradually rolled out to more users, ensuring stability and minimizing risk. Feature flags also help manage product tier entitlements and compliance by controlling access to premium features and sensitive data. Additionally, they support infrastructure migrations by enabling dark writes and reads to test new systems without impacting user experience, and act as circuit breakers to prevent system failures. The company utilizes feature flags in SRE runbook automation to handle excessive loads and in debugging to target specific issues, thereby reducing resolution times. Split advocates for the widespread adoption of feature flags within software companies, emphasizing their role in boosting productivity and reducing uncertainty in product development.

Holdback experiments are a strategic approach to validating long-term effects by exposing a small user segment to the original experience while rolling out improvements to the majority. This method allows for safe decision-making on compounding metrics like retention without delaying immediate business gains. When significant results take time, an uneven split, such as 95% to the preferred option and 5% as a holdback, ensures most users benefit from improvements while enabling measurement of long-term impacts. The approach is especially relevant when changes aim for immediate gains in business-critical metrics but require confirmation of longer-term effects, like customer satisfaction on retention. Although maintaining two versions can be challenging, holdbacks provide a more accurate measure of the long-term impact by comparing a small cohort against the rest. It's crucial to manage technical debt by engaging engineers and operational managers in the process, emphasizing the value of experimentation for long-term objectives. The holdback pattern, paired with tools like Split for feature management and experimentation, aids in reducing risk, enhancing deployment visibility, and ensuring continuous improvement through data-driven insights.

Harness has achieved SOC 2 Type II compliance and ISO 27001 certification, highlighting its dedication to maintaining high security standards and fostering trust, particularly in regulated industries. These certifications, validated by independent audits, confirm the effectiveness of Harness's security controls and policies over time, ensuring the protection of customer data. The SOC 2 Type II report, compiled by Schellman, verifies that Harness's information security practices, policies, and procedures meet the trust services criteria for security, availability, and confidentiality. Additionally, Harness has completed annual re-certification for the ISO 27001 standard and incorporated extra controls to comply with ISO 27017, which focuses on secure cloud services management. These standards are part of the ISO 27000 family, known for detailing best practices in information security management. Harness's certifications cover primary office locations in San Francisco and Bangalore, and the company's commitment to security is further demonstrated by their inclusion in the Cloud Security Alliance registry.

Harness's Auto-Pruning feature optimizes Kubernetes deployments by automatically removing untracked resources, thus preventing clutter and ensuring smooth rollbacks. This functionality enhances deployment efficiency, reduces manual cleanup efforts, and supports various deployment strategies such as rolling, canary, and blue-green. Auto-Pruning works by comparing the resources from the last successful release with those in the current release and pruning those no longer needed. The system also handles rollbacks by storing the necessary resource information in a ConfigMap, allowing for recreation if needed. Harness further provides customizability through annotations and addresses storage and security concerns by compressing large manifests and securing customer CRDs as Kubernetes Secrets. This feature allows users to maintain clean, up-to-date configurations while leveraging advanced deployment strategies without being restricted to basic rollout strategies.

Spring Boot is a framework that simplifies the development and deployment of microservices, enabling developers to focus on innovation rather than infrastructure. An example application demonstrates these principles by using an API gateway to return processed weather data, sourced from a private weather resource server within a microservice network. The system utilizes a Eureka discovery server for decoupling service providers from clients and enabling client-side load balancing. Feature flags, managed by Split by Harness, allow for dynamic application behavior, facilitating controlled rollouts and real-time adjustments without redeploying code. The application also incorporates HTTP Basic authentication with Spring Security 5, and Split's event logging to track API usage, showcasing the integration of various tools to build a scalable and flexible microservices architecture.

Harness has launched a Community Edition for Continuous Delivery, featuring source-available licensing and a suite of new capabilities across CI/CD, Feature Flags, and Cloud Cost Management to improve software delivery efficiency and security. Key updates include support for AWS EC2 Windows and Linux instances, enhanced .Net framework capabilities, and public APIs for feature flag management. The company has also introduced several educational initiatives through Harness University, offering new courses on security, deployment verification, and application architectures. Additionally, enhancements in cloud cost management such as fixed schedules for AutoStopping Rules and Azure VMs inventory management have been made. The initiative to make the CD platform open-source, as recognized by the Open Source Initiative, aligns with Harness's strategy to foster community engagement and trust.