Harness AWS: From Code to Cloud, Smarter and Faster

Harness has come a long way since its 2019 debut on the AWS Marketplace. Back then, over half of Harness customers were already running on AWS, and Harness focused on delivering Continuous Delivery as a Service for AWS applications. Today, Harness provides a unified platform for AI for Everything After Code, featuring robust new capabilities – from Continuous Integration (CI) and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) management to Cloud Cost Management – all beautifully integrated for AWS. 

This updated guide explores how modern DevOps teams can leverage Harness to accelerate software delivery on AWS, with harness-centric features that boost automation, reliability, and cost-efficiency. We’ll cover Harness’s comprehensive AWS support, new deployment strategies (like GitOps and canary for Lambda), IaC-powered cloud provisioning, AI-driven deployment verification, and cloud cost optimization. Let’s dive into the state-of-the-art in CI/CD pipelines for AWS using Harness.

Seamless Integration with AWS Services

Harness makes it straightforward to integrate your AWS environments and services into your CI/CD pipelines. You can subscribe to Harness directly via the AWS Marketplace for quick setup, and then simply connect your AWS accounts to Harness by providing credentials, configuring OIDC, or assuming IAM roles. 

This provides Harness with the necessary access to orchestrate deployments across your AWS infrastructure. Once connected, Harness supports a wide range of AWS artifact types and deployment targets out-of-the-box. For example, you can build and deploy Amazon Machine Images (AMIs), orchestrate updates to Amazon ECS containers or Amazon EKS clusters, roll out new AWS Lambda functions, and even coordinate AWS CodeDeploy releases.

Traditional application packages (WAR, EAR, RPM, IIS apps, etc.) are also supported for deployment to EC2 or on-prem servers. Harness automatically integrates with AWS artifact repositories like Elastic Container Registry (ECR) and S3 to detect and fetch new build outputs, ensuring your pipelines always have the latest artifacts. Alternatively, it can hold artifacts in its own Artifact Registry or connect to a third party like Artifactory. In short, whether your application runs on EC2 VMs, Docker containers, Kubernetes on EKS, or serverless Lambda, Harness can deploy it seamlessly on AWS.

Harness architecture for AWS deployments: The Harness platform (center) uses a lightweight Harness Delegate (runs in your infrastructure or Kubernetes) to connect with AWS. Through AWS IAM roles/keys, Harness coordinates deployments to AWS services (e.g. Amazon ECS in this diagram) on your behalf. This secure integration allows Harness to automate AWS deployments without manual scripting.

Unified CI/CD Pipelines

One major enhancement since 2019 is that Harness now offers Continuous Integration (CI) in addition to CD. This means AWS developers can use a single platform for the entire software lifecycle – from code commit, through build/test, to deployment. Harness CI provides cloud-native build infrastructure that can run on Kubernetes or on AWS itself. 

In fact, Harness CI supports spinning up ephemeral AWS EC2 build VMs to execute pipelines, including Windows build agents or privileged Docker builds that might not run in containers. Each CI stage can provision a clean AWS VM on-demand (with pooling to minimize startup time) and tear it down after the build, ensuring isolation and fast start times. This flexibility lets teams perform heavy builds or OS-specific tasks in AWS while keeping pipelines efficient.

On the Continuous Delivery side, Harness continues to provide visual pipeline modeling with a drag-and-drop UI, allowing you to define complex release workflows without writing custom scripts. Harness has always supported multiple deployment strategies, and those capabilities have expanded even more. You can choose between basic one-shot deployments and sophisticated phased releases, depending on your needs. Harness supports rolling updates, blue/green deployments, highly automated canary releases, multi-service orchestration for microservices, and custom strategies. These strategies work across AWS targets – for example, you might do a rolling update for ECS services or a blue/green swap for an EC2 Auto Scaling Group.

You can chain CI and CD stages together – for example, build a Docker image, push to ECR, then deploy automatically to an EKS cluster – all in one Harness pipeline. The platform also handles advanced logic, such as approvals, triggers, and failure strategies, globally across your AWS pipeline. With everything under one roof, DevOps teams enjoy unified logging, traceability, and governance from code to deployment, simplifying the toolchain and speeding up delivery.

To speed migrations to the cloud, it’s best to set up Templates that capture your best practices and reuse those across similar services. This reduces your effort both at onboarding and maintenance time. United Airlines, which was moving 80% of its workload to AWS, used to wait days for a junior engineer to build a pipeline, but can now create pipelines in seconds.

Infrastructure as Code Automation for Cloud Migration

Modern cloud initiatives often involve managing infrastructure through code, and Harness’s Infrastructure as Code Management (IaCM) module is built to streamline that process on AWS. You can store your IaC configurations in Harness and treat infrastructure changes similarly to application deployments. Harness performs the state management, so you don’t need to set up S3 buckets or DynamoDB for state locking.

Harness IaCM also introduces reusable modules and templates: you can define Terraform module libraries and workspace templates to standardize configurations across team. For example, you might have a vetted VPC or ECS cluster module that teams can reuse via Harness’s Module Registry, ensuring cloud setups follow best practices. And when developers propose an infrastructure change, Harness can enforce pull request workflows – changes can be automatically planned, with cost impact analysis and guardrails, before being merged and applied. 

In fact, Harness can estimate the cost of IaC changes up front, helping prevent unpleasant surprises from infrastructure modifications. All these capabilities make Harness a robust companion for cloud migration projects: teams can codify AWS environments (VPCs, clusters, databases, etc.), and Harness will safely orchestrate provisioning and teardown as part of your pipeline. This level of automation and control accelerates the movement of workloads to AWS while reducing manual errors during provisioning.

Security, Verification, and Governance Built-In

Deploying faster on AWS shouldn’t come at the expense of security or quality, and Harness addresses this with integrated verification and governance features. AI Verification and Rollback is a core strength of Harness’s CD module, after each deployment, Harness can automatically verify the new release’s health using metrics and logs. It has native integrations with AWS and third-party monitoring tools. For instance, Harness ties into Amazon CloudWatch (as well as services like Datadog, Prometheus, etc.) to analyze performance and error metrics in the context of a deployment. 

Backed by machine learning, Harness’s verification can detect anomalies or regressions caused by the new version. If something looks wrong – say CPU usage spikes or error rates increase – Harness can automate a rollback to the previous stable version. Rollbacks can be fully automated or require manual approval, depending on rules you set. This capability gives DevOps teams great peace of mind: even as you push updates frequently, Harness is watching like a safety net and can quickly undo a bad release before users even notice. 

On the security and secrets side, Harness integrates with AWS’s key management services so you can keep sensitive information safe. It supports both AWS KMS (Key Management Service) and AWS Secrets Manager as secret stores (in addition to third-party sources like Hashicorp Vault). This means API keys, database passwords, and other secrets used in your pipeline or infrastructure definitions can be pulled securely from AWS’s managed vaults – Harness will fetch and inject them at runtime without ever exposing plaintext values. 

For compliance, you can also apply OPA (Open Policy Agent) policies or use Harness’s governance features to ensure all deployments meet security rules. In short, Harness embeds numerous DevSecOps practices, including secret encryption, guardrails, and continuous monitoring, allowing teams to move quickly on AWS without compromising security or violating controls.

Cloud Cost Management – Optimize AWS Spend as You Deliver

A standout capability of Harness is its Cloud Cost Management module, which directly tackles the challenge of rising cloud bills. As teams accelerate delivery on AWS, it’s easy to waste money on idle or over-provisioned resources. Harness’s platform now includes intelligent cloud cost management (CCM) features to ensure you’re not burning budget unnecessarily. 

This goes hand-in-hand with CI/CD: after all, every deployment or new environment can affect AWS usage and costs. Harness provides engineering and FinOps teams with granular visibility into where AWS dollars are being spent. The solution provides out-of-the-box dashboards and reports for AWS spend, breaking down cost by service, by application, by team, etc., without requiring you to set up elaborate tagging. 

For example, with a few clicks, you can see the cost of each microservice or environment over time, or identify the top 20 AWS accounts or services by expense. Harness even offers hourly cost granularity (instead of AWS’s typical daily aggregates) for real-time insight into spikes. This helps catch anomalies faster. All this cost data is presented in a single pane alongside your pipeline – so developers and DevOps can correlate deployments or infrastructure changes with cost impact immediately. In fact, Harness “shifted down” cost responsibility to its own engineers using this module, and saw a 40% reduction in annual cloud costs by eliminating waste.

Beyond visibility, Harness takes it a step further with automated cost optimization. The platform uses AI-driven recommendations to spot savings opportunities. For instance, it can detect under-utilized EC2 instances, oversized Kubernetes pods on EKS, or idle EBS volumes – and then recommend rightsizing or shutting them down. 

Harness takes action through policies: its AutoStopping feature will automatically shut down dev/test AWS resources when they’re not in use (restarting them on demand), yielding up to 70% cost savings on non-production environments. 

New features like Commitment Orchestrator help optimize AWS EC2 reservations and savings plans, Harness analyzes your EC2 usage and manages purchase commitments to maximize discounts. For Kubernetes on AWS, the Cluster Orchestrator will intelligently scale EKS node groups and leverage Spot instances for up to 90% savings on cluster costsharness.io. 

By integrating cost management into pipelines (“FinOps inside CI/CD”), Harness enables a culture where developers optimize cloud spend just like they optimize performance or quality. The result: you deliver features on AWS quickly and cost-efficiently.

Conclusion: Accelerate Your AWS DevOps Journey with Harness

In summary, the Harness platform today is a feature-rich DevOps engine for AWS, encompassing everything from CI builds to CD deployments, infrastructure automation, verification, and cost control. It builds on the strong AWS support it had in 2019 and supercharges it with new modules and intelligence. AWS DevOps teams using Harness can release faster with confidence: you get one-click deployments to all major AWS services, safe deployment strategies (blue/green, canary, etc.) with auto-verification, and the option to go full GitOps if you choose. You can treat your infrastructure as code and let Harness handle the heavy lifting of provisioning and maintaining cloud environments, which is a boon for cloud migrations and managing complex AWS setups. Meanwhile, governance features (security integrations, approvals, audit trails) are baked in, so you remain compliant and in control. And as a cherry on top, Harness’s Cloud Cost Management ensures your AWS usage is optimized – empowering engineering to cut waste and do more with your cloud budget.

Want to learn more? Ask our team for a demo. 

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