Harness Acquires ChaosNative

Bringing Leading Chaos Engineering Solution to Award-Winning Software Delivery Platform

Acquisition of Original Creator of CNCF Project LitmusChaos Expands Harness Software Delivery Platform With Chaos Engineering to Help Enterprises Avoid Lost Revenue and Damaged Brand Reputation Resulting From Costly Downtime

SAN FRANCISCO—March 22, 2022—Harness Inc., the software delivery platform company, today announced the acquisition of ChaosNative Inc., the original creator of the popular CNCF project LitmusChaos, which is used by hundreds of leading organizations including Intuit, Mercedes, NetApp, Orange, Red Hat, and VMWare. ChaosNative Litmus is ChaosNative’s highly scalable and secure enterprise platform for chaos engineering, offered both in the cloud and on-premises. 

Together, the companies are integrating ChaosNative Litmus advanced testing capabilities into the award-winning Harness Software Delivery Platform, providing customers with the ability to reduce downtime across distributed environments, track reliability improvements, reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR), and provide a better end-user experience. This new module, Harness Chaos Engineering powered by Litmus, enables development teams to take full control of their service reliability. 

Loss of revenue from unexpected downtime is estimated at almost $550,000 per hour with 59% of Fortune 500 companies experiencing at least 1.6 hours of downtime per week. For consumer-facing companies in ecommerce, financial services, and organizations that rely on ad impression revenue, the cost is even higher and a site outage for a few hours can quickly result in losses of tens of millions of dollars. For the largest ecommerce sites, downtime can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per minute or more, with the company’s third party sellers, partners and customers facing losses as a result too. The calculable economic loss isn’t the only consideration– the stress on development teams and damage to brand reputation can linger long after services are restored 

Chaos engineering detects issues before they can become high-severity incidents that lead to downtime by stressing an application in testing or production environments, creating simulated real-world, disruptive events, such as server outages or API throttling, observing how the system responds, and implementing improvements to mitigate any observed points of failure before an incident occurs. While traditional testing uses situations where the outcome is known and simply being validated to be correct, chaos engineering takes a different approach by simulating real-world failure conditions to uncover unseen issues and performance bottlenecks that are difficult to find in traditional testing environments in order to avoid costly, damaging downtime.

“ChaosNative’s team of software engineers pioneered the very popular open source platform, LitmusChaos, which serves as the basis for many leading enterprises’ chaos framework. As enterprises continue to struggle with reliability as a result of ever increasing scale and complexity of their distributed systems, chaos engineering provides a solution. The integration of ChaosNative Litmus into the Harness software delivery platform helps customers easily introduce chaos engineering into their workflows to reduce costly downtime and increase resiliency and security,” said Jyoti Bansal, CEO, Harness. “We are thrilled to have ChaosNative’s incredible employees join Harness and together offer Harness Chaos Engineering powered by Litmus.”

“It is awesome to bring ChaosNative’s technology, customer base and employees to join 

Harness,” said Uma Makkura, CEO, ChaosNative. Until now chaos engineering has lived at the end of the Software Delivery Lifecycle (SDLC). With the Harness platform we are shifting the chaos engineering process left, providing an improved developer experience, freeing developer time for innovation rather than just testing.”

The acquisition is complete and Harness Chaos Engineering powered by Litmus is available in XXX. Harness will become a sponsor of the CNCF LitmusChaos project and community development and will provide additional support for the open source project.

About Harness

Harness is the only end-to-end platform for complete software delivery. It provides a simple, safe and secure way for engineering and DevOps teams to release applications into production. Harness uses machine learning to detect the quality of deployments and automatically roll back failed ones, saving time and reducing the need for custom scripting and manual oversight, giving engineers their weekends back. Harness Inc. is based in San Francisco. More on Twitter @harnessio and at harness.io.

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