Harness Product Update | March 2022

March Madness is wrapping up, how'd your brackets do? Basketball wasn't the only madness over here at Harness - we delivered a shipload of modules and features. From a brand new chaos engineering acquisition to the emergence of in-person events, it has been a crazy busy month.

New Modules

Service Reliability Management (SRM)

Harness Service Reliability Management is for teams that want a better way to balance the velocity of feature releases and bug fixes with the stability and reliability needs of a production environment. To learn more about Harness SRM, click here.

Security Testing Orchestration (STO)

Security Testing Orchestration is for teams that want to reduce the time and effort associated with interpreting, analyzing, and remediating application vulnerabilities detected by security scanners. Easily adopt the DevSecOps approach and build highly secure applications faster. To learn more about Harness STO, click here.

Harness Chaos Engineering

This month, we announced the acquisition of ChaosNative, a solution that will serve as the backbone of Harness Chaos Engineering. HCE will enable DevOps and SRE teams to purposely create chaos in deployments. Rather than waiting for things to break (which usually happens at the worst possible time with larger than expected ramifications) we break them ourselves and learn what happens when they do.

New Features

CI

• Self-Signed Certificates - All CI Steps now support self-signed certificates when communicating with third party solutions such as SCM providers, Docker registries, etc. 
• Image Versioning - You can now pin the version of the images used internally by Harness. This allows customers the opportunity to scan the images before starting to use newer versions. 
• Aggregate Tests - Tests Reports view now supported showing aggregate data from tests executed across all CI steps in your builds. 

CD

• Shell Script Timeout Errors to Be Handled by a New Failure Strategy - Now, you have the ability to have a separate failure strategy for Shell scripts if they are timing out and another for the rest of the failures. 

• Event Rules for Workflow Events - We have enhanced our Event rules, which were earlier supported for only Pipeline events, to now support Workflow events (Workflow start, Workflow end, Workflow paused, and Workflow continued) as well. We will send these events in both cases if it’s a direct Workflow execution or the Workflow is executing as part of the pipeline. This is behind the feature flag APP_TELEMETRY.

• Support Rollback Provisioner After Phases Enhancements - As part of MVP, we built support for having a new option in the failure strategy as Rollback Provisioners After Phases at Workflow & Step level. We have extended the same while a manual intervention is waiting for an action & for manual rollbacks triggered by you. This is behind the feature flag ROLLBACK_PROVISIONERS_AFTER_PHASES.

• GitHub Webhook Secret to Be Mandatory for Triggers - With this change, there is an app-level setting by which you can make it mandatory for all the GitHub triggers to contain Webhook secrets or else the invocations will fail. This is behind the feature flag GITHUB_WEBHOOK_AUTHENTICATION.

• Expression for Step Names - With this change, you can access Step names using an expression within the Step.

• Inline Hosts Support for Target to Specific Hosts - Now you can provide hosts, which are not present in the infrastructure definition, in the target to specific hosts. You also have the option to provide an expression which refers to the list of hosts. This is behind the feature flag DEPLOY_TO_INLINE_HOSTS.

• Instance Sync for SSH Services - We now support instance sync for SSH deployments (PDC, AWS, & Azure) by which the service dashboard will contain the real-time values of instances which are up for these services.

• Deprecated -Force from Terraform Destroy for Version 15 - With Terraform version 15, the -force option has been deprecated. We have deprecated the same in Harness as well.

• Values.yml Override at K8s Apply Step - Now, you can override your values.yml at Step level in a Workflow. You can do it either inline or remote (via Git repositories).

Feature Flags

• Ruby SDK - We now support Ruby as an official open source SDK from Harness for Feature Flags. You can now develop in Ruby as a server-side language in your applications when you use Harness Feature Flags.
• Xamarin SDK - We now support Xamarin as an official open source SDK from Harness for Feature Flags. You can now develop in Xamarin as a client-side language in your applications when you use Harness Feature Flags.

CCM

• AWS Account-Level and ECS Tags - Customers can now visualize, slice, and dice their AWS cloud cost information grouped by or filtered to account-level AWS tags and ECS cluster tags in Perspectives.

​​Harness University

New Modules and Courses: 

We have Role Based and Product Based Paths now available at Harness University.

New Releases for this month include: 

Harness Next Generation Foundations Courses have been updated to include:

• Getting Started: Git Experience - This Getting Started module will cover how Harness enables your pipeline configuration to be managed in a Git repository and troubleshooting errors.

• Getting Started: Manager and Delegates - This course has been updated to include Immutable Delegates.

Continuous Delivery Module:

• Deployment Strategies - This getting started module will cover basics of a Continuous Delivery pipeline, its structure, and strategies you can use for deploying to different environments.

Harness University Live:

We are offering Continuous Integration and Feature Flags live training starting this year!

• Harness Fundamentals Day 1 and Day 2: April 11th and 12th, 6a-9a PST
• Harness Administration: April 13th, 6a-10p PST
• Harness Continuous Integration and Feature Flags, April 14th, 6a-10p PST  

To register for April and beyond, view our Live Events Calendar. 

Harness Community 

Community Forum:

• Top Harness Articles
• What is Progress Deadline config in Kubernetes and how it impacts Harness Deployments? (479)
• Configure the WinRM service on a Windows host to allow authentication and remoting from non-administrator user accounts (466)
• K8 deployment is failing with “deploymentname” is invalid (209)

Community Events:

• Past:
• Mar 2 - Adaptive Cards & Drone Plugin Cards
• Mar 30 - ​​Building & Using Drone Plugins
• Upcoming:
• Apr 1 - Harness CD Community Edition - Getting Started
• Apr 5 - Intro to Harness Service Reliability Management (SRM)
• Apr 12 - Introduction to Harness GitOps
• Apr 13 - Building Your First Drone Plugin - Step by Step
• Apr 15 - Drone CI & Harness CD - Setting up a CI/CD pipeline
• Apr 26 - Intro to Harness Security Testing Orchestration (STO)

Upcoming Events

April 2022:

• April 12th - AWS Summit: Paris (Booth S7)
• April 20th-22nd - DevOXX Paris
• April 21st - AWS Summit: San Francisco (Booth 615)
• April 27th - AWS Summit: London (Booth S14)

May 2022:

• May 11th-12th - AWS Summit: Berlin (Booth S16)
• May 17th-20th - KubeCon Europe, Stand S23
• May 18th-19th - AWS Summit: Atlanta
• May 23rd-25th - AWS Public Sector Summit

Looking Ahead

In the next few weeks/months, here’s what’s coming at ya: 

CI

• Plugin Cards - Drone will support Plugin Cards. Plugin Cards allow plugins to extend Drone’s UI by contributing visualization to the build summary view. This feature provides a central location of high-level insights into what is happening in the build and allows developers to identify bugs and defects faster. This feature is planned to be added to the Harness platform in Q2 2022. 
• Support for New Properties in K8s Pod Spec - CI users that run builds on K8s can now set additional properties in the stages pod spec, such as ephemeral storage, mounting persistent volume, node selector, and more.
• GCP VMs as Build Infrastructure - Ability to run builds on GCP Windows / Linux Virtual Machines. 
• MacOs as Build Infrastructure Support - Ability to run builds on AWS MacOS machines, and on physical MacOs machines.
• Test Intelligence 
• Support .Net Core in Unit Tests  - Customers will be able use Test Intelligence with their .Net Core applications in order to optimize and reduce their unit test execution time.
• Support Scala and Kotlin in Unit Tests  - Customers will be able use Test Intelligence with their Kotlin and Scala applications in order to optimize and reduce their unit test execution time.

CD

• Apply Deployment Tags (Pipelines and Workflows) During Execution - You will have the ability to resolve tags during execution and won’t need to wait till the end of the execution.
• Artifact/Manifest Collection Disabled - We are disabling auto artifact collection and will perform it at runtime. This is to solve the performance issues and OOM issues you might have faced in the past.
• Pipeline Deployment Permissions for Specific Pipeline - You will be able to give deploy permissions for some pipelines to your users for a set of environments. This is going to be behind a feature flag.
• Deployments Using GCP Connector for Versions >= 1.19 - You will be able to deploy to your GCP cloud provider if it is >=1.19 version.

CCM

• ECS Recommendations - Customers will have access to recommendations for their ECS clusters. Based on historical utilization, customers will receive recommendations on how to better configure their services and tasks, including the ability to run What If scenarios and add buffers to the configuration.
• Azure Anomaly Detection - Customers will soon be able to leverage the full power of Harness CCM’s Anomaly Detection for Azure. Based on historical cloud spend patterns, our algorithms will detect and surface spend anomalies across Azure services and resources. Anomaly notifications will also be available via email and Slack.