Harness Overview
Harness is an end-to-end software delivery platform designed to streamline, automate, and optimize the entire software delivery lifecycle, leveraging the power of AI and machine learning.
Core Functionality
At its core, Harness aims to simplify and accelerate the journey from code to production. It automates key stages of the software delivery pipeline, including continuous integration (CI), continuous delivery (CD), and rollback decisions when issues arise. This automation reduces the risk of human error, saves valuable engineering time, and ensures more reliable and consistent deployments.
Key Features
AI-Driven Deployment Decisions
Harness uses machine learning algorithms to analyze historical deployment data and real-time performance metrics, allowing it to determine the optimal deployment strategy for applications. This includes techniques such as canary releases, blue-green deployments, and rolling updates, all executed with minimal manual intervention.
Integration with Development Tools
Harness seamlessly integrates with existing development tools and workflows, including popular version control systems like Git, build tools like Maven or Gradle, and cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud. This integration enables teams to continue using familiar systems while benefiting from enhanced automation capabilities.
Modular Architecture
The Harness Platform consists of various modules, each designed for different use cases:
- Harness Continuous Integration (CI): Simplifies the code development and testing process, integrated with other Harness modules for unified CI/CD pipelines.
- Harness Continuous Delivery (CD): Manages the deployment process, including service deployments and rollback strategies.
- Harness Security Testing Orchestration (STO): Orchestrates security testing within the CI/CD pipeline.
- Harness Feature Flags: Allows changing software functionality without deploying new code, using feature flags to hide or expose code or behavior.
Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) and Governance
Harness provides robust RBAC, enabling fine-grained control over access at all scopes, from the global account level to individual pipelines. This includes principles (users, user groups, service accounts), roles, and resource groups that define permission sets. Additionally, Harness supports governance using Policy as Code with Open Policy Agent (OPA) to add governance guardrails.
User and Service Account Management
Harness offers comprehensive user and user group management, including various authentication options such as username and password, public OAuth providers, SAML providers, and LDAP. Service accounts are available for external system integrations, with API keys that inherit the permissions assigned to the service account.
Secrets Management
The platform includes built-in secrets management to store encrypted secrets and integrates with popular secrets managers, ensuring secure access to sensitive information.
Pipelines and Workflow Automation
Harness provides unified CI/CD pipelines with visual controls and approval gates, allowing teams to manage the entire software delivery process without navigating between multiple applications. Pipelines can be combined with other actions, such as feature flags, Jira issues, notifications, and approvals.
Additional Capabilities
- Harness Open Source: An end-to-end open source software development platform that unifies managing source code repositories, CI/CD pipelines, hosted development environments, and artifact management.
- Hosted Development Environments: Allows setting up preconfigured, secure development environments that can be easily shared and accessed from anywhere using favorite IDEs.
In summary, Harness is a powerful tool that automates and optimizes the software delivery process, integrating seamlessly with existing development tools and workflows, and providing robust governance, security, and management features to ensure efficient, reliable, and secure software deployments.