GitLab and Harness From Someone Who's Been There, Done That

Transitioning from GitLab to Harness enabled a field engineering organization to address CI/CD scalability, deployment diversity, and process automation challenges, resulting in enhanced efficiency and reduced manual labor. Harness offered out-of-the-box dashboards, configurable connectors, and pipeline governance, which provided a comprehensive view and streamlined operations across various projects and infrastructure. While GitLab's integration with source control facilitated project onboarding and collaboration, it required substantial scripting and manual intervention to handle complex tasks and diverse infrastructure deployments. Harness, in contrast, simplified the development and visualization of complex workflows, integrated seamlessly with Jira, and provided pipeline governance and advanced dashboards, yet some manual processes remained. The ability to use Terraform and CloudFormation in Harness pipelines, along with its feature of Continuous Verification, further enhanced deployment quality and reduced monitoring time, offering a robust solution for managing diverse and complex engineering needs.