Harness Launches Two New Modules to Bolster Demand for Next-Gen Software Delivery

As a leader in continuous delivery and now integration, Harness' latest updates help customers enforce quality and compliance at scale, reduce the time to remediate vulnerabilities, and provide continuous deployment for cloud-native and serverless applications.

FREMONT, CA: Harness, the platform for software delivery, announced two new modules at its inaugural user conference, 2020: Continuous Integration Enterprise and Continuous Features. Continuous Integration Enterprise is the first AI/ML-powered continuous integration (CI) solution to optimize build and test cycles for engineers. The second new module, Continuous Features, helps developers and engineers manage "feature sprawl" and "progressive delivery," reducing the time it takes to release features from weeks to minutes. Additionally, Harness is releasing major updates to its industry-leading Continuous Delivery, Continuous Verification, and Continuous Efficiency products.

Harness also announced its vision for a comprehensive next-generation intelligent software delivery platform that applies AI/ML to control, optimize, and accelerate the flow of software pipelines. Instead of engineers manually verifying builds, tests, deployments, and releases, Harness' platform will apply data science to automatically observe the quality, performance, cost, and reliability of code as it flows through each pipeline step, and if need be, abort, automate or rollback the delivery of software to customers in production without manual intervention.

"The rise of cloud-native architectures and increased fragmentation of infrastructure environments makes shipping software in a scalable and secure manner an incredible challenge," said Jyoti Bansal, CEO, and co-founder, Harness. "That's why Harness is focused on building the next generation of software solutions and contributing to open source projects to make it easier to get to better software more quickly. Whether our customers are running applications in containers, in the cloud or on-premises, we are here to help. We are meeting our customers where they are and taking them to where they need to be in an increasingly multi-cloud world."

Harness Continuous Integration Enterprise

Continuous Integration Enterprise is the industry's first smart CI solution, with embedded AI/ML, enabling engineers to build and test their code in any environment, including SaaS or on-premises. Harness acquired open-source CI pioneer Drone.io in August, and Harness' CI Enterprise inherits many design concepts that Drone customers know and love, such as container-based pipeline steps that enable quick bootstrapping, low maintenance, easy customizations, and parallel step execution.

For the first time, Harness introduces AI/ML to enable development teams to prioritize and reduce test cycle time by up to 75 percent. Instead of requiring all tests to be executed with every change, tests are correlated and isolated to changed code, allowing only relevant test cycles to run. Continuous Integration Enterprise also identifies gaps in test plans by highlighting code changes that are not covered by existing test cycles. Library caching and container image size optimization will soon be introduced so that engineers can run smarter, faster, and more efficient builds with their resources.

Harness Continuous Features

Continuous Features will be the first feature flag management solution to be deeply embedded into the CI/CD lifecycle, bringing new intelligence, clarity, and simplified workflows for engineers to release and manage feature flags. Traditionally, engineering teams spend sprints cleaning up feature flags during build and test cycles, creating toil for engineers that slow down their velocity and innovation pace.

Continuous Features solves the "feature flag nightmare" with a visual interface for feature verification and analytics. The easy-to-use dashboard monitors all flags, including active, inactive, live, and unrequired flags, as well as customer issue tickets, making prioritization and remediation a breeze.

Additional updates to the Harness platform for software delivery include:

• Harness Continuous Efficiency "Project Lightning" – In June, Harness released Continuous Efficiency, enabling developers and DevOps teams to proactively monitor their cloud usage and control spending in real-time. Project Lightning helps customers lower on-demand compute and spot rates and eliminate cloud waste on-demand. Project Lightning can save customers 40-75 percent on their public cloud bill, beyond existing CE savings, based on early customer trials feedback.

• Harness Next Generation Continuous Delivery – Harness' flagship continuous delivery-as-a-service platform has been optimized for the developer experience, with core design principles around simplicity, scale, and security. Updates include a new, intuitive user interface, GitOps and pipelines-as-code, bi-directional sync and conflict management, and powerful templates to standardize deployments across teams.

• Harness Next Generation Continuous Verification – Extends the concept of deployment verification to all cloud and application changes. Now, developers will have greater visibility into the impact of changes within any environment, such as container orchestration changes, auto-scaling changes, configuration changes, or cluster changes. Continuous Verification has also been designed and built to work standalone with other CD solutions to provide customers with added choice and flexibility.