March 2022 Summaries

Harness Cloud Cost Management's Intelligent Cloud AutoStopping feature effectively reduces unnecessary cloud expenses by automatically halting idle resources such as AWS EC2 instances and RDS databases when they are not in use, resuming them upon detecting traffic, and thereby achieving significant savings in pre-production environments. Idle resources, which contribute substantially to cloud costs, are typically billed by the minute regardless of actual usage, leading to increased operating expenses without value addition. This feature helps mitigate such costs by reclaiming wasted budgets through automated savings, reducing developer toil, and minimizing idle resources to zero, unlike AutoScaling. AutoStopping, which currently supports AWS EC2, AWS ECS, and Kubernetes, has now been expanded to include AWS RDS, given its widespread adoption and potential for cost spikes even during inactivity. By creating specific AutoStopping Rules tailored to use cases involving EC2 and RDS dependencies, RDS-only applications, or fixed schedules, users can seamlessly integrate cost-saving measures into their cloud infrastructure, enhancing financial efficiency and freeing up resources for business growth.

Harness has introduced several advancements, including new modules like Service Reliability Management (SRM) and Security Testing Orchestration (STO), and the acquisition of ChaosNative to enhance its Chaos Engineering capabilities. This expansion aims to empower DevOps and SRE teams in managing deployments and security more efficiently. Harness University has also expanded its educational offerings with role-based and product-based learning paths, alongside live training sessions focused on modern DevOps practices. New features have been added to support continuous integration and delivery processes, such as self-signed certificates, image versioning, and enhanced event rules for workflow events. Additionally, Harness has introduced new SDKs for Ruby and Xamarin, enabling support for Feature Flags, and has expanded its cloud cost management capabilities with AWS tag visualization and upcoming Azure anomaly detection. These developments are set against a backdrop of active community engagement and participation in industry events, with further enhancements planned for the upcoming months.

Tyler Technologies, a leading provider of information management solutions for the public sector, has enhanced its software delivery process by integrating Harness Feature Flags into its CI/CD pipeline. This integration allows for greater control over feature releases, enabling product teams to manage release cadences, perform A/B testing, and apply their own risk management strategies. Previously, Tyler Tech faced challenges with large, coordinated releases, but by shifting to a cloud-based delivery model, they can now decouple deployment from software releases, focusing instead on controlled feature exposure. The decision to expand their partnership with Harness was influenced by the seamless integration of feature flags into their existing CI/CD processes, the supportive relationship with the Harness team, and the shared engineering-oriented culture. This collaboration marks the beginning of a new era in Tyler Tech's software delivery, allowing them to better meet the needs of stakeholders and customers while leveraging cloud benefits.

Harness is enhancing its commitment to diversity and inclusion by revitalizing its women@harness Employee Resource Group (ERG) with a new mission to empower women at all levels of the company through mentorship and allyship, aiming to boost individual and organizational success. An executive sponsor, General Counsel Jill Passalacqua, has been appointed to champion this mission, bringing her leadership experience to the initiative. The ERG leadership team, consisting of passionate volunteers, plays a crucial role in the program's development, alongside celebrating and supporting women's achievements in the workplace. As part of this initiative, key members like Ankita Rosensweig, Britney Pierini, and Fanny share their experiences and efforts in breaking biases and supporting women's professional growth, aligning with the International Women’s Day theme #BreakTheBias. The company aims to have a broader impact on the tech industry's climate beyond its internal environment and encourages participation by inviting people to join their community or talent network.

Vivek Kumar Bansal's article explores the use of TypeScript to enhance static analysis, validation, and autocomplete when externalizing strings in React applications, aiming to boost developer productivity and minimize errors. The process involves writing a Node.js script to read a YAML file and generate TypeScript types, which are then utilized in the `StringsContext` file to enable TypeScript's features for string keys. The script generates a type that represents all possible keys from the YAML file, supporting nested keys by concatenating parent keys with periods, a convention common in the JavaScript ecosystem. This approach not only facilitates validation and autocomplete but also allows for integration into a build system for automated type generation, ensuring that updates to the YAML file reflect in the TypeScript types seamlessly. The article includes a detailed implementation guide and code snippets to help developers customize the solution to fit their specific use cases.

Harness Inc. has acquired ChaosNative Inc., the original creator of the LitmusChaos project, to integrate chaos engineering capabilities into its software delivery platform, aiming to enhance service reliability and minimize costly downtimes. This integration will allow enterprises to simulate real-world disruptive events to proactively identify and address system vulnerabilities, thus improving service resiliency and reducing mean time to resolution. The move is expected to provide significant financial benefits, particularly for companies in sectors like ecommerce and financial services, where downtime can lead to losses of hundreds of thousands of dollars per minute. By incorporating ChaosNative's expertise, Harness aims to shift chaos engineering earlier in the Software Delivery Lifecycle, enhancing developer experience and allowing teams to focus more on innovation rather than just testing. The acquisition also sees Harness becoming a sponsor of the CNCF LitmusChaos project, further supporting open-source community development.

Harness Service Reliability Management (SRM) is a new module in the Harness Software Delivery Platform aimed at balancing high feature release velocity with production stability by adopting SLO-driven software delivery. It enhances collaboration and governance between engineering and reliability teams, facilitating the implementation of a Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) program as outlined in Google's SRE Handbook. Harness SRM helps teams avoid the common pitfalls associated with the SRE model, such as manual tracking of SLOs, conflicts between teams, and difficulties in scaling reliability practices. It introduces reliability guardrails within CI/CD pipelines, which use SLO and Error Budget data to determine pipeline progress, ensuring that software development maintains both speed and reliability. The module promotes a cultural shift towards a collaborative relationship between engineering and reliability teams, allowing them to deliver software more efficiently and reliably.

Harness Inc. has expanded its software delivery platform by acquiring ChaosNative and launching two new modules, Service Reliability Management (SRM) and Security Testing Orchestration (STO), to enhance software resiliency, reliability, and security. The acquisition introduces Chaos Engineering capabilities, enabling enterprises to achieve their resiliency goals by integrating reliability practices into the CI/CD pipeline. The SRM module embeds Service Level Objectives (SLOs) to ensure unreliable code does not reach production, while the STO module automates security scanning to reduce vulnerabilities before deployment, thus allowing developers to deliver reliable and secure software rapidly. These enhancements aim to balance the conflicting goals of velocity, resiliency, and security, providing a unified modern software delivery pipeline that empowers developers to meet business objectives effectively.

Harness's acquisition of ChaosNative, the primary sponsor of the LitmusChaos project, aims to enhance chaos engineering practices for enterprises, particularly within cloud-native services, by integrating these methods into CI/CD pipelines. This collaboration intends to help developers identify issues earlier in the delivery cycle while maintaining LitmusChaos's community-first approach and expanding its feature set. Over the past four years, LitmusChaos has evolved from offering chaos experiments for Kubernetes-based microservices to a comprehensive framework supporting a wide range of application and infrastructure targets. The project has achieved CNCF incubating status, reflecting its maturity and widespread adoption, and it continues to see significant community engagement. As part of Harness, efforts will focus on improving chaos orchestration services, expanding the fault library, and supporting SREs, along with exploring new chaos engineering use cases and maintaining active community involvement through events and workshops. The initiative also plans to introduce certifications to further spread chaos engineering knowledge, supported by the ongoing dedication of the LitmusChaos team and the broader chaos engineering community.

Harness Security Testing Orchestration (STO) is a solution designed to automate and streamline the process of security testing by integrating with over 40 popular security scanners and providing a centralized view of vulnerabilities. It is tailored for developers and DevSecOps teams to facilitate shift-left security practices by embedding security testing steps into CI/CD pipelines, allowing for real-time remediation of vulnerabilities during software development. Harness STO normalizes, deduplicates, and correlates scanner data to produce a prioritized vulnerability list, reducing the workload for engineering teams and enhancing the security posture of applications before they reach production. The platform supports both static and dynamic application security testing, offers configurable governance through Open Policy Agent, and provides comprehensive audit trails and role-based access control to meet organizational security needs. Additionally, it features enterprise dashboards and reports tailored for various roles within an organization, making it a centralized source for security-related information.

Harness Service Reliability Management (SRM) is a tool designed to enhance collaboration between engineering and reliability teams by allowing them to define Service Level Indicators (SLIs), Service Level Objectives (SLOs), and error budgets, which integrate into CI/CD pipelines to improve production reliability and compliance. By incorporating reliability guardrails that halt pipeline execution upon SLO violations, SRM aims to proactively identify and address reliability issues throughout the software delivery lifecycle, thereby reducing production incidents. The platform features change impact analysis to correlate infrastructure changes with reliability metrics, ensuring that any modifications do not adversely affect application services. Reliability checks are embedded at various stages of the development lifecycle to detect and resolve issues early, facilitated by integrations with external tools and native error tracking. With enterprise-grade audit trails and role-based access control (RBAC), Harness SRM streamlines compliance processes, while its integration capabilities enable it to work with popular observability and logging solutions, leveraging AI and ML techniques to identify potential reliability concerns.

Harness Security Testing Orchestration (STO) is a new module within the Harness Software Delivery Platform designed to facilitate the adoption of DevSecOps by automating and prioritizing vulnerability detection, thereby integrating seamlessly into CI/CD pipelines. It allows engineering teams to maintain high development velocity without compromising security by automating the interpretation and remediation of application vulnerabilities detected by security scanners. STO simplifies the process by creating security guardrails and policies that enforce compliance, while its ability to normalize, deduplicate, and correlate scanner results offers a prioritized list of vulnerabilities with suggested remediations. This solution supports engineering and DevOps teams by eliminating manual efforts in analyzing scanner data and ensuring that velocity and security can coexist within the development process.

Harness enhances Source Code Management (SCM) by integrating it with CI/CD pipelines, offering features like AI-powered semantic search for efficient code discovery and supporting pipelines as code for version control and peer reviews, thus streamlining the DevOps workflow and improving team collaboration. SCM, a critical component in the DevOps ecosystem, facilitates efficient tracking and management of source code changes, promoting collaboration, transparency, and innovation in software development. It serves as the backbone for managing changes, ensuring high-quality software production, and enabling rapid, reliable code changes while enhancing collaboration and visibility. Harness offers a unified platform, integrating seamlessly with various SCM systems like GitHub and GitLab, and enhances the SCM experience by updating pull requests with pipeline execution status and supporting pipelines as code. This integration and functionality reduce the need for multiple tools, increase efficiency, and improve the overall productivity of software development teams.

Harness leverages its own Continuous Delivery (CD) platform to optimize software development, testing, and deployment, thereby enhancing product reliability and user experience. By employing a self-use approach, Harness continuously improves its features and processes through real-time feedback and frequent releases. The CD process at Harness involves Continuous Integration (CI), Non-Production Environments (NPEs), branching strategies, and feedback loops, which facilitate seamless code integration, comprehensive testing, and efficient deployment across various environments. Harness demonstrates its commitment to quality and user satisfaction by using its products to build, test, and deploy internal services, allowing for the identification and resolution of issues before reaching customers. This approach not only accelerates release frequency but also fosters transparency and collaboration, ultimately leading to better user experiences and innovative feature development.

Harness has announced support for Ruby in its Feature Flags, allowing developers to manage features efficiently using the Ruby SDK, which offers the same functionality and performance as other supported SDKs. Ruby's versatility and widespread use in various applications make this addition significant for users who have integrated Ruby into their systems. The Ruby SDK enables users to leverage feature flags in server-side applications, with guidance available through the Ruby SDK Reference for setup and implementation. Users are encouraged to ensure both the SDK setup and the feature flag creation in the Harness project are complete for a fully functional deployment, with additional support available through in-app wizards and documentation.

Feature flags are increasingly crucial in product development, enabling teams to manage their lifecycle, measure their impact, and integrate them into the tech stack. While many teams begin with open-source or homegrown solutions, these basic tools often lack the scalability and integration capabilities needed to manage feature flags effectively. Split addresses these limitations by opening its Feature Data Platform to third-party and homegrown feature flag data, allowing teams to utilize Split's advanced experimentation and analytics regardless of their existing systems. This new capability, termed External Feature Flags, integrates with various feature flag sources, enabling data ingestion and enhanced control, insight, and governance over feature flags. The integration with platforms like Microsoft Azure App Configuration further enhances the ability to manage and measure the impact of feature changes, providing real-time evaluations, audit logs, and the ability to correlate flag changes with performance indicators through integrations with tools like Datadog and Slack. This approach not only improves feature management and experimentation but also fosters continuous improvement and innovation within product engineering teams.

Implementing DORA metrics is essential for organizations aiming to enhance development velocity and software quality by using data-driven decisions to align with business outcomes. These metrics, established by the DevOps Research & Assessment program, include Software Delivery Lead Time, Deployment Frequency, Mean Time To Restore (MTTR), and Change Failure Percentage. They serve as a baseline for measuring the performance and responsiveness of engineering teams. However, accurately capturing these metrics can be challenging due to the need to integrate data from various sources across the DevOps toolchain. Tools like Harness Software Engineering Insights offer a solution by integrating data from over 40 sources, enabling organizations to identify and eliminate software delivery bottlenecks while providing a comprehensive view of engineering operations. Tracking these metrics helps organizations not only improve their development processes but also ensure software quality and operational performance, allowing them to resolve incidents quickly and minimize customer impact.

Harness celebrates International Women's Day by emphasizing the role of its women@ Employee Resource Group in promoting gender equality and combating unconscious biases, aiming to foster a diverse and inclusive workplace. The group's leaders, including Heidi Newiger, Ruchira Bajaj, and Tiffany Nguyen, share their personal motivations and strategies to #BreakTheBias, such as implementing gender-neutral hiring practices, providing positive feedback, and empowering women to advocate for themselves. They stress the importance of employee resource groups in building supportive communities and encourage recognizing and celebrating women's achievements to drive gender equity. By sharing experiences and resources, the women@ group aims to create a more equitable workplace, supporting underrepresented groups and inspiring others to join the movement towards inclusivity in the tech industry and beyond.

Implementing Git branching within Harness entities such as Pipelines and Connectors enhances the efficiency of CI/CD pipeline development by enabling isolated testing and seamless merging. By leveraging MongoDB as a cache and utilizing Git webhooks, the system improves operational workflow with low latency and real-time updates. This integration allows for version control practices, such as branching and merging, to be applied to Harness entities, ensuring that changes can be made and tested in isolation without disrupting others. Despite challenges, such as Git's file system-based storage, the use of MongoDB helps overcome potential performance bottlenecks by caching entities, while Git webhooks facilitate asynchronous updates in response to events. The system also provides users with a familiar experience akin to Git providers, supporting features like branch shortlisting, user credentials for Git operations, and branch forking with pull request creation. These enhancements promise significant potential for modern DevOps solutions by streamlining the development, testing, and maintenance of CI/CD pipelines.

Git Sync enhances the CI/CD experience by allowing developers to manage configurations as code, facilitating pipeline setup and maintenance through bi-directional synchronization with Git, and supporting diverse repository patterns for flexible configuration management. This approach aligns with DevOps principles, blurring the lines between development and deployment, and emphasizes the importance of maintaining configurations in the same way as code. Git is upheld as the source of truth, ensuring that any changes are reliably mirrored between Git and Harness through webhooks and API integrations. The system accommodates various configuration storage patterns, allowing users to organize their repositories as they prefer, and consolidates Harness entities within a designated .harness folder in the repository. This method reduces the complexity and manual effort typically associated with CI/CD processes, bridging communication gaps between development and operations teams, and promising significant potential for modern DevOps solutions.

Feature flags are a powerful tool for product managers, enabling them to control feature releases, gather early customer feedback, and reduce dependence on engineering teams, which streamlines the development process and enhances customer-centric development. While feature flags are typically seen as an engineering tool, they play a significant role for product managers, allowing them to test and validate user experiences with customers, manage beta programs, and enable direct customer interaction without engineering involvement. They facilitate experimentation by serving different user experiences and collecting data for analysis, though they work best when integrated with specialized data platforms for user behavior analysis. Feature flags also separate release from deployment, allowing product managers to schedule feature launches independently of engineering timelines, thus making launch days less chaotic and more controlled. This capability fosters autonomy and customer-focused practices within modern software delivery teams, making feature flags essential for achieving an empowered product management approach.