September 2024 Summaries

Harness has introduced a new certification path to become a Harness Certified Implementation Engineer, designed to enhance the capabilities of its Partner Ecosystem. This certification serves as a capstone credential for individuals who have achieved a certain level of expertise in the Harness Platform, recognizing their knowledge and experience. It allows professionals to specialize in areas such as digital transformations, cloud migrations, and DevSecOps modernizations, each with specific focus modules like Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery & GitOps, Security Testing Orchestration, and Infrastructure as Code Management. The certification process begins with joining the Harness Partner Network and includes a training path culminating in an accreditation exercise involving a panel discussion with Harness Architects. This credential is seen as a significant milestone, acknowledging a modern skill set that addresses current industry challenges.

Harness Open Source is a newly launched open-source edition of Harness's enterprise software delivery platform, designed to streamline the software development lifecycle by consolidating various tools needed for development, code management, build and deployment pipelines, and artifact management into one unified solution. This platform allows developers to set up cloud development environments, manage code repositories, and deploy code more efficiently using a single Docker command, thus significantly enhancing productivity. Harness Open Source boasts features such as native code hosting, code reviews, pre-installed tools integration with IDEs like Visual Studio Code, and a fully integrated CI/CD pipeline. It supports over 100 integrations and offers security measures like secret and artifact scanning. By simplifying installation through zero-friction Apache 2.0 licensing, development teams can quickly adopt the platform, which has already demonstrated substantial improvements in build times for companies like United Airlines.

Harness Cloud Development Environments (CDE) offer a transformative solution to common developer challenges by providing secure, cloud-hosted environments that can be launched with a single click, thus improving the developer experience, accelerating onboarding, and enhancing security. These environments, known as Gitspaces, come pre-configured with all necessary tools and dependencies, reducing the time developers spend on setting up and maintaining local machines, which often lack the resources to efficiently handle complex applications. By ensuring standardized configurations with zero drift between local and central environments, CDEs eliminate the notorious "works on my machine" bugs, thus enhancing productivity and satisfaction among developers. Additionally, CDEs bolster organizational security by keeping source code and sensitive information in the cloud rather than on individual developer machines, allowing for centralized governance and security policy enforcement, which is particularly beneficial for organizations using third-party or contract developers.

Harness Database DevOps is a new module designed to seamlessly integrate database changes into CI/CD pipelines, automating schema management and governance while ensuring full visibility across environments. It addresses the challenges of manual database change management, which often results in bottlenecks and deployment risks, by introducing automation and GitOps workflows. The module supports major databases and allows for effective collaboration between developers and DBAs by treating database code like application code, thus enhancing consistency, reliability, and delivery speed. Harness Database DevOps provides features such as native database awareness in pipelines, rollback capabilities, a unified overview of database changes, and governance controls to ensure compliance with centralized policies. It facilitates increased visibility into recent database changes, enabling quick identification and resolution of issues, and it supports various GitOps structures for environment management. The module is built collaboratively with input from over 30 customers, and it continues to evolve based on feedback from design partners.

The Harness Supply Chain Security (SCS) module is designed to enhance the security of software supply chains by rapidly identifying and addressing vulnerabilities in code repositories, CI/CD tools, and artifact registries. It aligns with major risk frameworks like OWASP Top-10 CI/CD Security Risks and CIS Supply Chain Security Benchmarks, and integrates with platforms such as GitHub. The module addresses the increasing complexity and sophistication of software supply chain attacks, exemplified by high-profile incidents like the SolarWinds and CodeCov breaches. Harness SCS facilitates continuous governance, risk management, and compliance (GRC) by evaluating security postures against extensive rulesets, enabling organizations to pinpoint and remediate vulnerabilities swiftly. The SCS module offers features such as a compliance dashboard that displays rule failures and provides detailed remediation guidance, aiming to make the process of achieving compliance more straightforward for CISOs and compliance leaders. As the frequency of supply chain attacks is expected to rise, having tools like Harness SCS is critical for maintaining robust security defenses.

Harness Artifact Registry is a new addition to the AI-native Software Delivery Platform, aimed at improving how DevOps and Platform engineering teams handle artifacts. This universal hub centralizes artifact management, reducing complexity by consolidating multiple registries into a single secure location. It enhances build reliability and developer productivity through faster, stable builds and seamless integration with Harness CI and CD modules. Security is a priority, with features such as fine-grained role-based access control, security scanner integrations, and comprehensive audit trails, ensuring adherence to industry standards. The registry offers end-to-end traceability of artifacts, crucial for maintaining software quality and regulatory compliance. Looking ahead, Harness plans to integrate AI capabilities, including AI-assisted search, into the registry. Available commercially and as part of Harness Open Source, it aims to simplify artifact management, boost DevOps efficiency, and strengthen software supply chain security.

Harness AI Productivity Insights (AIPI) is a beta feature designed to help engineering leaders measure the productivity gains from AI coding tools like Google Gemini Code Assist and GitHub Copilot. It enables comprehensive analyses and comparison reports to evaluate the impact of these tools on developer productivity by contrasting cohorts of developers who use AI tools against those who don't, as well as tracking performance over time. AIPI allows for one-click integration with source code management systems and AI tools for seamless data collection, offering both quantitative metrics and qualitative insights through surveys to enrich the analysis. This solution aims to assist leaders in optimizing investments in AI-powered development assistance by providing detailed reports on productivity scores, velocity, and quality metrics, and allowing flexible cohort comparisons based on various metadata filters.

Harness is advancing the landscape of AI-native software delivery through innovative enhancements to its platform, aiming to streamline developers' workflows and foster creativity by minimizing manual tasks. Highlighted at the {unscripted} 2024 conference, Harness introduced nine new or updated products, including AI-powered assistants designed to automate tasks and provide real-time insights, enhancing productivity and innovation. More than 900 customers, such as Ulta Beauty, United Airlines, and Citibank, have already adopted the platform, witnessing significant improvements in deployment volumes and efficiency. The company has also focused on expanding its capabilities with the acquisition of Split Software and the introduction of Harness Cloud Development Environments and Artifact Registry, while maintaining a commitment to open source. Furthermore, Harness was recognized as a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for DevOps Platforms, underscoring its rapid pace of innovation and comprehensive approach to software delivery. The platform now allows developers to manage their entire software development lifecycle from a centralized location, supporting everything from coding to deployment and security, with a strong emphasis on increasing developer productivity and modernizing DevOps practices.

Harness has introduced three innovative AI agents designed to revolutionize software delivery by enhancing automation and efficiency across the software development lifecycle. The AI QA Assistant accelerates test creation and reduces maintenance through generative AI, allowing for faster release cycles by integrating automated testing into CI/CD pipelines. The AI DevOps Assistant simplifies pipeline creation and modification using natural language, offering proactive suggestions and automatic remediation to minimize downtime and improve reliability. Meanwhile, the AI Code Assistant boosts developer productivity by offering intelligent code completion, natural language function generation, and semantic search, facilitating a more efficient and collaborative development environment. Together, these tools aim to transform the software delivery process by automating routine tasks, providing intelligent insights, and enabling developers to focus on high-value activities, thereby maintaining a competitive edge in the digital marketplace.

Centrally defined policies for database migrations are crucial in modern database management, ensuring consistency, compliance, and security by enabling organizations to effectively manage these migrations. Harness customers often use the platform to orchestrate database changes, employing the rego-based policy engine to enforce centralized policies that restrict certain SQL commands, thereby enhancing reliability and security. These policies are vital in regulated industries like finance and healthcare, safeguarding against unauthorized changes that could lead to data loss or downtime. They promote collaboration between developers and database administrators, streamline communication, and integrate automated governance into CI/CD pipelines, allowing for faster software deployment while maintaining compliance. An example policy, implemented using rego, prevents data-dropping commands in production environments by matching SQL against predefined regular expressions. Harness's Database DevOps product, developed with input from over 30 customers, facilitates seamless and reliable database changes akin to application code deployments, with the company inviting further participation as it enters public beta. Stephen Atwell, who leads this product, has extensive experience in IT operations and software development, contributing to his focus on creating solutions for challenges faced by technologists.

Harness's Policy as Code framework offers a methodical approach to embedding governance, security, and compliance rules within CI/CD pipelines, ensuring adherence to organizational and regulatory standards without compromising speed and flexibility. By utilizing predefined policies and organizing them into Policy Sets, organizations can efficiently manage and enforce governance across multiple environments and pipeline stages. The framework supports gradual policy adoption, allowing teams to initially enforce rules at a WARN level to minimize disruption before transitioning to stricter ERROR enforcement, which blocks pipelines if violations occur. It emphasizes the importance of focusing policies on critical pipeline elements like secrets and connectors and advocates for continuous monitoring and updating of policies to adapt to organizational growth and evolving regulatory landscapes. Additionally, the framework encourages the development of custom policies to address unique governance needs and recommends maintaining comprehensive documentation and regular training sessions to ensure team-wide understanding and compliance.

Integrating Internal Developer Portals (IDP) and Infrastructure as Code Management (IaCM) is highlighted as a crucial strategy for streamlining software development and operations by reducing complexity, enforcing consistency, and preventing configuration drift. IDPs centralize access to tools and resources, enhancing developer efficiency and collaboration, while IaCM automates infrastructure management, ensuring consistent, repeatable, and scalable deployments. This combination addresses challenges in modern software development, such as configuration drift and inefficient resource allocation, by providing a unified framework that enables teams to focus on building software efficiently. The blog suggests that as organizations scale, the integration of these solutions becomes increasingly essential to maintain efficiency, reliability, and compliance across dynamic environments, making them vital for supporting growth and innovation.

Cloud cost visibility is crucial for effective management of cloud expenses, encompassing the tracking, analysis, and understanding of costs associated with cloud services. It provides organizations with insights into resource utilization and spending, aiding in informed decision-making for cost optimization. Effective cloud cost visibility involves organizing data into comprehensible formats like dashboards and reports, enabling businesses to identify inefficiencies and optimize resource allocation. It also facilitates accurate budget planning and forecasting, allowing organizations to prepare for future expenses and maximize return on investment. Key strategies for achieving cloud cost visibility include building a collaborative FinOps team, establishing a solid data foundation, leveraging dashboards and reports, creating a tagging strategy, implementing anomaly detection, and using budgeting and forecasting tools. Tools like Harness Cloud Cost Management (CCM) utilize AI and machine learning to automate and enhance these processes, ensuring comprehensive tracking and optimization of cloud expenditures.

Harness implemented a tiered approach to cloud infrastructure, leveraging Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools such as OpenTofu and Terragrunt, alongside Kubernetes and Helm Charts to manage their cloud-native stack of microservices. This stack is divided into four tiers, each with specific responsibilities ranging from fundamental cloud infrastructure management to microservices deployment, ensuring security and operational efficiency. By employing on-demand Devspaces for development and testing, Harness has significantly enhanced its development processes, allowing numerous independent teams to perform end-to-end feature testing without integration bottlenecks. Git-based version control ensures repeatability and auditability across their infrastructure, while the Environment-as-a-Service model driven by Harness pipelines facilitates the rapid creation of production clusters and development environments. This initiative has successfully reduced the time to deploy new production clusters from weeks to mere hours, and future plans include improving system usability and potentially open-sourcing their infrastructure repository for wider benefit.

In a comprehensive survey conducted by LeadDev and involving 500 engineering leaders, the importance of feature management and experimentation in software development is emphasized, highlighting the need for robust solutions like those provided by Split by Harness. The survey reveals that successful feature management is strongly linked to the ability to monitor system performance and user behavior at the feature level, with 82% of successful respondents affirming this capability. Additionally, risk mitigation and feature optimization are identified as key benefits of feature-level monitoring, with 78% of respondents recognizing the importance of these elements. The report underscores a shift in priorities from speed to safety and impact, with 78% of participants emphasizing the role of risk mitigation and optimization in feature management practices. The integration of feature flags with CI/CD pipelines is highlighted as a critical step for future platforms, enhancing context and traceability. The survey also identifies a growing trend where experimentation is increasingly becoming an engineering responsibility, indicating a collaborative effort between product and engineering teams to leverage experimentation for product innovation. Moreover, the survey reveals challenges with homegrown feature flagging solutions, which often increase technical debt, pointing to the need for advanced, automated solutions. The report concludes by urging teams to adopt proven feature management and experimentation solutions to innovate safely and effectively, warning that reliance on outdated or homegrown systems could result in falling behind industry standards.

AWS Cloud Cost Management is crucial for optimizing cloud investments by providing enhanced visibility, forecasting costs, and maximizing resource utilization. It involves practices and tools to plan, organize, report, analyze, and control the usage and costs associated with AWS resources, aiming to optimize spending and improve financial control. Key strategies include using Reserved Instances and Savings Plans for discounted pricing, optimizing resource utilization with tools like AWS Trusted Advisor, and leveraging Spot Instances for cost-effective compute capacity. AWS offers several tools such as the Cost Management Console, Cost Explorer, and Budgets to help businesses monitor and manage their expenses effectively. Additionally, tools like Harness Cloud Cost Management use AI and machine learning to streamline cloud cost management, offering features like automated resource management and cost-saving recommendations. These practices and tools together help organizations reduce unnecessary expenses while ensuring efficient cloud operations.

Harness CI is a continuous integration tool designed to optimize software development processes through features like intelligent caching and cloud builds, providing faster feedback cycles and improved efficiency compared to competitors such as Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, and CircleCI. It emphasizes ease of use with minimal scripting, extensive integration capabilities, and out-of-the-box scalability, making it suitable for growing teams. The tool also offers robust security features and automation, including AI-driven deployment verification and rollback, which can significantly save time. While Jenkins is noted for its flexibility, it requires more manual configuration to scale, and CircleCI provides a wide range of environments but suffers from security and stability issues. GitHub Actions and GitLab CI offer various automation and integration options but come with their own limitations. Choosing the right CI tool depends on factors such as ease of use, integration capabilities, scalability, cost, governance, and automation needs, with Harness CI presenting itself as a strong contender with its intelligent features and enterprise-level offerings. Chinmay Gaikwad, the author, has a background in making complex technologies accessible, with experience in roles that range from software engineering to technical marketing.

GitOps and Terraform are powerful tools for managing infrastructure as code, allowing organizations to automate, version-control, and collaborate on infrastructure management. By combining these approaches, teams can streamline workflows, improve consistency, and enhance the reliability of infrastructure deployments across various environments. The article outlines a four-step process to implement GitOps with Terraform, which involves setting up a Git repository, configuring infrastructure, creating an automated pipeline, and implementing a pull request workflow. This synergy of GitOps and Terraform, particularly when enhanced by platforms like Harness, enables the application of software development best practices to infrastructure management, resulting in more reliable, secure, and agile deployments. OpenTofu, a community-driven fork of Terraform, offers a viable alternative for organizations preferring a fully open-source solution, maintaining compatibility with Terraform's syntax and provider ecosystem. Ultimately, embracing automation, version control, and continuous improvement principles is key to successfully managing modern infrastructure in a complex technological landscape.

Implementing Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) best practices is essential for optimizing software delivery, focusing on frequent code commits, maintaining stable builds, and enforcing deployment through automated pipelines. Emphasizing collaboration, these practices include early and frequent code integration, prioritizing test execution, ensuring environment consistency, and using metrics to monitor pipeline performance. The Harness Software Delivery Platform supports these practices by offering fast builds, test optimization, and comprehensive governance features, reducing the need for custom scripting and facilitating efficient collaboration across teams. By aligning with these principles and leveraging tools like Harness, organizations can enhance their software delivery processes, ensuring a faster and more reliable deployment of high-quality software products.

DevSecOps pipelines are an integrated approach to software development that incorporate security practices throughout the entire lifecycle, emphasizing collaboration among development, security, and operations teams to ensure security is embedded in every stage. This method contrasts with traditional approaches that apply security measures only after deployment, instead "shifting left" to address vulnerabilities early in the process. Key tools in a DevSecOps pipeline include Software Composition Analysis, Static and Dynamic Application Security Testing, secret and container scanners, Infrastructure-as-Code scanners, and Policy-as-Code governance, all of which work together to identify and manage vulnerabilities in both open source and proprietary software components. Successfully implemented DevSecOps pipelines enhance security posture and code quality without compromising developer productivity, leading to reduced security incidents, improved compliance, increased deployment frequency, and a decrease in vulnerabilities reaching production.

Harness, a company co-founded by Jyoti Bansal, has been recognized as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for DevOps Platforms, underscoring its innovation and comprehensive DevOps solutions that cater to major brands like United Airlines, Ulta Beauty, and Citi. The company, founded in 2017, offers robust, scalable, and intelligent platforms that support application development, deployment, and operation, incorporating AI to automatically address issues such as broken builds and security defects. This recognition is seen as a significant milestone for Harness, attributed to its customer-centric approach and commitment to solving unique software delivery challenges. While this achievement marks a proud moment, Harness views it as the start of a new chapter in which they aim to further streamline software development and delivery processes. Additionally, Jyoti Bansal's entrepreneurial ventures include co-founding Traceable, an API security platform, and Unusual Ventures, a venture capital firm reinventing the VC engagement model with over $1 billion under management.

Organizations face a critical decision between on-premises and cloud-based CI/CD solutions, each offering unique benefits aligned with different priorities such as security, maintenance, scalability, cost, and flexibility. On-premises CI/CD, hosted within an organization's private infrastructure, provides enhanced control over data and compliance but requires significant resources for management and maintenance, exemplified by tools like Jenkins. Conversely, cloud-based CI/CD utilizes cloud infrastructure to offer scalability, reduced maintenance, and flexibility, with platforms like Harness providing advanced features such as GitOps and automated verification across major cloud providers. While on-premises setups may appeal to organizations with stringent security needs and integration with existing systems, cloud-based solutions are ideal for those prioritizing agility and ease of use. The choice between these approaches depends on specific organizational needs, including regulatory requirements, budget, and team expertise, with some organizations opting for a hybrid approach.

DevOpsDays Halifax 2024 emphasized the importance of optimizing CI/CD pipelines to boost developer productivity, with companies like Harness showcasing strategies such as efficient testing, caching, and parallelism to reduce build times. The event, held on August 21-22, brought together around 150 tech practitioners to discuss emerging trends like AI-driven operations, GitOps, and DevSecOps, reflecting the evolving landscape of DevOps in modern software development. Notable presentations included Sid Palas's keynote on the 'DevOps chasm,' highlighting challenges teams face as applications scale, and Jamie Li's talk on optimizing CI/CD pipelines for enhanced productivity. The conference also featured discussions on AI's role in DevOps, the benefits of GitOps and Infrastructure as Code, cost-efficient DevSecOps practices, and advanced observability techniques with Grafana. The event fostered engaging discussions and networking opportunities, allowing participants to explore new insights and strategies in DevOps practices, while Harness added a touch of fun with their Star Wars LEGO raffle, blending technology and pop culture.

Integrating Open Policy Agent (OPA) and ChaosGuard into Infrastructure as Code (IaC) workflows offers a comprehensive approach to maintaining compliance and resilience in dynamic environments, vital for modern DevOps operations. OPA automates compliance by enforcing policies and rules, ensuring that infrastructure aligns with organizational standards without the need for manual checks, which is particularly beneficial as environments scale. Meanwhile, ChaosGuard facilitates resilience testing through Chaos Engineering, allowing controlled chaos experiments that help teams understand system vulnerabilities without causing significant disruptions. Together, these tools help teams focus on innovation while maintaining system stability and security, addressing the challenges posed by increasingly complex infrastructure.

Azure cost optimization involves implementing strategies to enhance resource utilization, minimize waste, and align spending with organizational financial goals without compromising performance. Effective management is crucial due to the "pay for what you use" model, which can lead to rapid cost increases if not properly handled. Techniques include understanding usage patterns, utilizing Reserved Instances and Savings Plans to avoid over- or under-commitments, and leveraging autoscaling to adjust resources dynamically based on demand. External tools like Harness Cloud Cost Management (CCM) offer machine learning and AI features to optimize costs, automate resource management, and improve efficiency, helping organizations strategically manage their investments in Azure cloud services.

Harness's Custom Recommendations feature, driven by Cloud Asset Governance, offers a flexible approach to cloud resource optimization via simple YAML policies that extend beyond cost concerns to address security, compliance, and tag automation. Unlike traditional recommendation systems that are often prescriptive and limited, this feature allows for highly customized recommendations, such as optimizing Lambda functions for startup performance with SnapStart, by leveraging policy-as-code. Harness achieves comprehensive cloud resource coverage across AWS, Azure, and GCP, enabling tailored recommendations for resources like EC2 instances, Virtual Machines, and Compute Engine instances. By integrating with Cloud Custodian, it supports extensive cloud assets and enables the creation of custom recommendations to manage infrastructure efficiently. This initiative is part of Harness's broader effort to democratize cloud cost optimization, empowering teams to control and implement cost-saving measures effectively.

Dark themes are increasingly popular among software engineers and designers, with over 70% of developers opting for them in their Integrated Development Environments (IDEs), and they are frequently among the top downloaded themes. This preference is evident in major coding text editors like Atom, Sublime Text, Brackets, and Visual Studio Code, which all support dark themes. While scientific studies on the benefits of dark themes are limited, anecdotal evidence suggests they offer eye comfort, battery efficiency, and aesthetic appeal, making them suitable for various lighting conditions. Harness, a software company, is responding to this trend by prioritizing theming options that cater to user preferences, including accessibility features for visually impaired users, and plans to launch a dynamic dark theme beta soon.

Navigation is a crucial component of any digital system, significantly affecting user experience, efficiency, and satisfaction. Harness has rapidly evolved its navigation design to align with business goals, adapt to user needs, and improve usability. This involves understanding diverse user personas within its extensive suite of over 15 integrated software delivery modules, ensuring a unified experience through consistent navigation. Harness employs a hierarchical structure with Account, Organization, and Project levels, allowing users to manage resources independently and foster innovation. Emphasizing efficiency, speed, flexibility, and customization, Harness continuously refines its navigation design through testing and analytics to maintain its relevance and effectiveness amid changing software landscapes.

Designing user experience (UX) for enterprise applications involves balancing user needs with business, security, and scalability requirements, necessitating a strategic approach to manage complexities and maintain development velocity. Key strategies include understanding the user landscape through engagement, persona creation, and journey mapping, while designing for complexity and scalability by prioritizing information architecture, modular design, and progressive disclosure. Efficiency and productivity are optimized by streamlining workflows and enhancing data management, while robustness and flexibility are achieved through customization, integration, and scalability considerations. Accessibility and inclusivity are ensured by adhering to guidelines and considering diverse user needs, and consistency is maintained through design systems and standardized components. Continuous improvement is vital, incorporating user feedback and usage analytics to iterate and evolve the design, ultimately enhancing productivity and satisfaction while contributing to enterprise success and growth.

Harness's August 2024 product updates highlight several advancements across its suite, including being named a leader in the 2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant for DevOps platforms, reflecting its commitment to enhancing software delivery processes. Notable updates include faster build times in Continuous Integration through enhancements like large file storage support and Build Intelligence, which caches unchanged build outputs for efficiency. Continuous Delivery sees the introduction of Build Intelligence to optimize resource usage, while Chaos Engineering expands its fault library for better resilience testing. The platform introduces new features such as code repository label support and AI-powered custom recommendations for cloud governance. Infrastructure as Code Management is streamlined with a new plugin for developer portals, and the Internal Developer Portal offers customizable homepages and new API response-based dynamic pickers. Harness also advances its security capabilities with automatic pull requests for issue remediation and policy failure ingestion for enhanced pipeline governance. The updates demonstrate Harness's ongoing dedication to providing a robust, efficient, and secure platform for modern software development and deployment.