September 2022 Summaries

Harness has introduced support for PHP in its Feature Flags, enhancing feature management capabilities for PHP developers with a new SDK that facilitates quicker feature deployments and better control over application updates. PHP, a longstanding and widely-used language for web development, is now integrated with Harness's open-source SDKs, providing familiar patterns and use cases for existing users. Developers running server-side programming on platforms like Facebook, WordPress, and Wikipedia can now leverage Harness to manage features efficiently. To implement PHP for feature flags, users can refer to the PHP SDK Reference for guidance on setup and initialization, while ensuring that features or changes are wrapped in a flag within their codebase and created in the Harness app. Additional assistance is available through documentation and an in-app wizard, and interested users are encouraged to start with a free trial.

Harness has introduced a new Delegate-first approach to streamline the onboarding process and simplify deployment setup within five minutes for new users of its platform. This method involves installing a Delegate, which acts like a self-hosted runner, connecting infrastructure such as Kubernetes clusters to Harness. Delegates facilitate various tasks including integration with Git repositories, artifactories, cloud providers, and verification services, alongside managing continuous integration and delivery pipelines. The setup requires a Kubernetes cluster with specific hardware and permissions, and involves generating and applying a YAML manifest to create the necessary Kubernetes objects. Once the Delegate is operational, users can proceed to create and manage their pipelines through an intuitive visual editor, further enhancing their software development process.

Kubernetes supports several deployment strategies, such as rolling, canary, and blue/green, to facilitate smooth updates while minimizing risks. Rolling deployments update nodes in a continuous manner, canary releases introduce changes to a small subset of users to test for issues, and blue/green deployments switch traffic between two nearly identical environments to avoid downtime. These strategies are key in deploying production-ready containerized applications and are chosen based on the application's architecture, such as monolithic, microservices, or serverless. Each method ensures reliable application delivery, maintains uptime, and gathers initial user feedback, reducing the risk of deploying faulty code. Platforms like Harness provide tools that simplify the deployment process by supporting these strategies, allowing developers to make informed choices that suit their application's needs.

Integrating Sonatype Nexus IQ with Harness Platform facilitates automated vulnerability scanning within the CI/CD pipeline, promoting early risk identification and mitigation to enhance application security. This integration utilizes Nexus IQ's CLI for container scans, managed through Harness's workflow for efficient deployments. The initiative is part of the DevSecOps movement, which emphasizes empowering developers to make informed, secure choices. The setup process involves running Nexus IQ on a CentOS instance and deploying a vulnerable container into a Kubernetes cluster. Through a detailed setup involving the installation of Harness Delegates and configuring Nexus IQ CLI, developers can manage container scans and orchestrate deployments using Harness Workflows. The process includes creating a Harness Environment, defining infrastructure, and executing a vulnerability scan on a Webgoat Docker image using a shell script. Part two of the guide promises to delve deeper into operationalizing these scans by utilizing the Harness Secrets Manager for credential storage and introducing deployment logic to handle critical vulnerabilities.

Harness celebrates Hispanic and Latino Heritage Month by sharing personal stories of its employees, underscoring the cultural richness and diversity within the company and highlighting its commitment to inclusivity. The event, expanded from a week to a month-long celebration by President Reagan in 1988, coincides with various national independence days in Latin America and Brazil. Employees from different backgrounds, including Mexican, Spanish, and Latino heritage, share their experiences and challenges in the workplace, their cultural values, and traditions. These stories reflect the importance of family, hard work, and cultural pride, showcasing unique celebrations like "Las Fallas de Valencia" in Spain and culinary traditions such as making tamales. Despite facing challenges in their professional lives, these employees express optimism for future representation and diversity in the tech industry, emphasizing the resilience and support found within their communities.

The blog post by David Martin explores the integration of Split, a leading feature delivery platform, with Contentful, a popular headless content management system, to enhance content management workflows and facilitate content experimentation. It highlights how Split's feature flags can be utilized for controlled releases and experimentation, while Contentful's API efficiently delivers content to web pages. The article provides a technical guide on initializing and using the Contentful Javascript API and Split's Javascript SDK, including tips on implementing feature flags and conducting A/B tests through DOM manipulation and event tracking. It also introduces Split Arcade, a resource for product tutorials and challenges, emphasizing the platform's capability to conduct feature experiments and improve development workflows without compromising speed or safety.

Harness GitOps-as-a-Service aims to enhance enterprise application deployment by integrating scalability, security, and governance into GitOps processes. By building on popular tools like Argo CD and Flux, it offers centralized management and enterprise-grade controls, ensuring reliable and secure delivery. The service addresses challenges faced by developers in microservices architecture, such as complexity and frequent deployments, by providing policy as code, audit trails, and role-based access controls. It emphasizes improved developer experience, scalability, and control, while allowing for seamless orchestration of complex deployments. The solution provides a centralized GitOps control center, enabling teams to manage and view deployments across multiple environments, with features like continuous verification and automated rollbacks to bolster reliability. Harness GitOps-as-a-Service can be adopted by enterprises using either a hosted Argo CD solution or their own instances, facilitating an easy start without scalability issues and offering comprehensive visibility into deployment health and status.

Harness Cloud Cost Management (CCM) has garnered recognition in The Forrester Wave™: Cloud Cost Management And Optimization, Q3 2022, for its innovative approach to reducing cloud expenses through features like Intelligent Cloud AutoStopping and Kubernetes cluster right-sizing. Initially introduced in Q3 2020, Harness CCM was developed in response to the rising need for efficient cloud cost management tools as more customers transitioned to cloud-native infrastructure. The platform's focus is on automating cost savings, with Cloud AutoStopping identifying and halting idle cloud resources in real-time to prevent unnecessary expenditure. Additionally, Harness CCM offers a comprehensive cost management strategy for Kubernetes, providing visibility, savings, and forecasting capabilities. The Perspectives feature allows users to view cloud cost data from various angles tailored to business needs, facilitating better governance and optimization decisions. With only two years in the market, Harness CCM has already positioned itself among the top 10 providers in the cloud cost management sector, demonstrating significant growth and impact on customers' cloud cost efficiency.

Harness CI's architecture is built to manage up to a million builds per day, utilizing microservices, Kubernetes, and asynchronous processing to ensure reliability and resilience, even under surge loads. The system's design principles emphasize simplicity, extensibility, scalability, and high reliability, allowing users across teams to create and execute pipelines efficiently. The platform's microservices are hosted on a GCP Kubernetes cluster, enabling automatic scaling to accommodate fluctuating demand, while ensuring seamless execution through asynchronous message queues and event-driven architecture. Harness CI also implements a sophisticated webhook processing system and pipeline execution framework to handle high volumes of traffic and ensure consistent performance. The use of fully managed solutions like MongoDB and Redis, alongside auto-scaling capabilities, minimizes operational overhead and prevents system bottlenecks. The architecture includes comprehensive disaster recovery plans and monitoring tools to maintain high availability and system health, allowing Harness CI to provide a robust and user-friendly experience.

CircleCI is a prominent CI/CD platform that offers features such as the Insights Dashboard, clean environments, and reusable configurations known as Orbs, which cater to various infrastructures and facilitate DevOps practices. Founded in 2011 in San Francisco, CircleCI supports both cloud and on-premise setups and automates the build, testing, and deployment processes across diverse environments like Linux, macOS, Windows, ARM, and Android. While it excels in continuous integration, the platform also provides continuous deployment capabilities following its acquisition of the company Vamp. CircleCI's complex credit-based pricing model may pose challenges for users, as it includes charges based on compute resources and events like pull requests, making cost management less transparent. Despite CircleCI's support for CI best practices and infrastructure options, users may encounter limitations in areas beyond core CI functionalities, such as governance and stability, with noted outages and limited SCM connectivity. Alternatives like Jenkins, GitLab CI, and Harness CI offer different approaches, with Harness CI emphasizing cloud-native scalability and governance features.