November 2023 Product Updates

November 2023 Product Updates

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At Harness, we have been hard at work so you can delight your customers without facing software delivery toil. Here is what has been changing in the previous month across Harness Products.  

Continuous Delivery & GitOps

1. Added support for Deployment Freezes: Now, when configuring a coverage rule for a deployment freeze window, if you choose to include all services or all environments, Harness gives you the option to exclude specific services or environments, respectively. This functionality is the same as the options provided for excluding organizations and projects, and it reduces your effort when the entities you want to include outnumber those you want to exclude.
2. Added support for pipeline events: The following pipeline events now include the name, pipeline tag, and failure message:

• PIPELINE_FAILED
• STAGE_FAILED
• STEP_FAILED

The following pipeline events now include the name and pipeline tag:

• PIPELINE_SUCCESS
• STAGE_SUCCESS
  
  

3. User interface improvements: The column widths and text truncation on the secrets listing page have been adjusted to make longer secret names more readable.
   
   
4. Input and output variables for Tanzu deployments: You can now add input and output variables to the Tanzu Command step and step template to facilitate Tanzu deployments.
   
   
5. More intuitive tag creation: Tag creation is now more intuitive in the Harness user interface. When you enter text in a tag field, a create button appears, and you can select that button or press Enter to create the tag.
   
   
6. Availability of deployment step group templates in custom stages: When opened in the context of a custom stage, the Templates side panel in Pipeline Studio lists step group templates created from deployment stages. The Type dropdown field in the panel also includes entries for filtering step groups created from custom and deployment stages.
7. Improved user experience when viewing errors in the console view: You can now increase the height of the error panel in the pipeline console. This change improves the readability of error messages and suggestions.
8. Resolved expressions for runtime inputs in custom dashboards: For runtime inputs, custom dashboards now show resolved trigger expressions instead of the expressions themselves.

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Full Continuous Delivery & GitOps Release Notes

Continuous Integration

1. New Support for test splitting in Test Intelligence: You can now enable test splitting for Test Intelligence in the Visual editor as well as the YAML editor.
2. New support for Windows 2022: Upgraded built-in steps to support Windows 2022.
3. Log limits have been expanded: The individual log line limit is now 25KB. Log lines longer than 25BK are truncated.
4. Updated support for self-signed certificates: When you configure a Kubernetes build farm to use self-signed certificates, you can now use DESTINATION_CA_PATH instead of CI_MOUNT_VOLUMES and ADDITIONAL_CERTS_PATH.
5. Harness AIDA GA: The Harness AI Development Assistant (AIDA™️) for CI is now generally available. AIDA for CI provides error analysis and remediation for failed pipelines. Harness bases these recommendations on the step logs and the context of the failed step.
6. New Support for Google Artifact Registry: This release includes a new Build and Push to GAR step offering first-class support for build and pushing artifacts to Google Artifact Registry (GAR). Previously, you could use Run steps to build and push to GAR. This new step combines the build and push steps into one streamlined step.

Full Continuous Integration Release Notes

Cloud Cost Management

1. Added Support for CSV Exports: Previously, there was no option to export Recommendations as CSV files. Now, we have added a new feature that enables users to export Recommendations as comma-separated values (CSV) files
   
   Full Cloud Cost Management Release Notes
   
   

Service Reliability Management

1. New Support for SLO Details: On the SLO Details page, you can now view the count of contributing SLOs for composite SLOs. This enhancement simplifies the management of composite SLOs.
2. Update to quarterly SLOs: Added the option to set the start month of quarterly Service Level Objectives (SLOs). This enhancement helps you define your SLOs and match them with your organization’s reporting and operational cycles.
3. Search Functionality Update: A new search functionality for the service and environment filters drop-down on the Changes page has been introduced. The filters now display a Search option when the drop-down list contains more than 10 options.
4. SLO Support Updated: The maximum number of simple SLOs that can contribute to a composite SLO has been increased from 20 to 30.
5. Change Impact UI Update: Because a majority of change sources are now configured automatically, the behavior on the Change Impact screen has been modified. Now, when no change event is found in the selected time range, the "No Change Event" message is displayed instead of "Configure Change Source”.

Full Service Reliability Management Release Notes

Chaos Engineering

1. Experiment Run & Experiment Report has been enhanced: This enhancement provides more details for better auditing, including the following:
   Added probe details along with description of failures, number of probes passed/failed/not-executed.
   Added tunables for corresponding chaos faults in an experiment
   Project, Organization & Account Identifiers are now available in the report header itself.
2. Audit Trail update: Updated UPDATED_BY field to show SYSTEM when a Chaos Resource is deleted automatically with respect to a Project/Organization/Account deletion.
3. Enhanced Chaos infrastructure process: Enhanced the Chaos infrastructure upgrade process to automatically change to UPGRADE_FAILED status if the upgrade has been in progress for more than 2 hours. This will allow users to attempt an upgrade again once the upgrade has failed/timed-out.
4. Experiment Execution Timeout Update: Enhanced the experiment execution process to timeout a particular experiment if it has been running for more than the threshold timeout i.e. 2 hours
5. Enhanced Error messaging on probes: Enhanced the stopOnFailure option to change the status of an experiment to COMPLETED_WITH_ERROR in case of probe failure
6. New Tunable added: Added a new tunable ServiceExitType for vmware-service-stop chaos fault which will allow users to choose if they want the target service to be killed gracefully or not.
7. Added Chaos functionality: Added functionality to kill processes with process name in vmware-process-kill chaos fault.
8. New Connector Support: Added support for Git, GitLab, and BitBucket as native Connectors using Harness Secret Manager
9. New pod-delete fault support: Added support for the execution of pod-delete fault against workloads which are not managed by the standard native-controllers such as deployment, statefulset and daemonset. With this change, this fault can be executed on pods managed by custom controllers
10. New Cron Schedule Support: Added support for enabling and disabling schedules for cron experiments. This can be found in the right-side nav bar.
11. Enhanced Network fault Support: Enhanced Network Chaos faults (loss/latency/corruption/duplication) to support specific source and destination ports from the network fault i.e., traffic to the defined ports will not be impacted by the chaos injection
12. Enhanced Service Experiments on GKE: Enhanced service kill experiments on Google Kubernetes Engine (now uses the gcloud ssh function to carry out the kill operations instead of deploying a helper pod on the targeted node). Also added support for containerd runtime
13. Added Support for SecurityContexts: Added support for specifying securityContext for chaos experiment related resources via user interface under advanced configuration. As part of supporting OCP4.11+ we have also stopped appending default security context attributes runAsUser & runAsGroup into the experiment/infrastructure manifest, and instead given the users the ability to add them optionally via the UI.
14. New Operator Support: Added support for <,>,<=,>= operators as part of the comparator in HTTP Probe via User Interface.
15. Added Support for Downloading Logs: Added a download button in the Logs Tab allowing users to download the logs for the node in ".log" format for further debugging/reporting purposes.
    
    Full Chaos Engineering Release Notes

Internal Developer Portal (IDP)

IDP has now graduated from Beta into Public Preview. During Unscripted in September, we made a series of announcements. Here are some quick links for your recap.

• Launch Demo in Keynote by Jyoti Bansal and Eric Minick.
• Platform Engineering Demo by Alex Valentine.
• Announcement Blog Post by Himanshu Mishra.

1. Scorecards are now GA: Scorecards are now launched for everyone. It contains several data sources and data points within the framework. There are default checks for you to use. You can create custom checks as well.
2. Added support for EntityRelationWarning: EntityRelationWarning is now available to be used in Layout. You can add this in your layout so that a warning alert is displayed if the entity has relations to other entities, which don't exist in the catalog.
3. New Plugins support available in IDP: Grafana - Associate alerts and dashboards to components, SonarQube - Components to display code quality metrics from SonarCloud and SonarQube.
4. UI Enhancement: Every plugin page now has a plugin docs available.
5. Enhanced Github Scorecard support: Scorecards now support additional data points for GitHub data source, to support advanced GitHub Security features and GitHub Actions
6. Enhanced Error messaging for secrets: We've introduced more explicit error messages when removing secrets to ensure users are fully aware and cautious of this action.
   
   

Full Internal Developer Portal Notes

Software Engineering Insights

1. Added support for standardized date and date-time format: This update ensures that all dates and times are displayed in a uniform manner across the platform for enhanced clarity and consistency.
   Standardized date format: DD MMM YYYY (e.g., 21 Aug 2023)
   Standardized date-time format: DD MMM YYYY HH:mm (24-hour format; e.g., 25 Aug 2023 11:06)
2. Improved UX for widget intervals: Improved the UX for widget intervals and column selection options. This update ensures that intervals and column options are displayed in a uniform manner across the following widgets
3. Testrail Report enhancement: In the TestRail report the default option picked in the Metric section were “Test Executions”, but was not displayed in the UI when a widget was added. This issue has been resolved for better explainability to end user and now is displayed in the UI explicitly.
4. Enhanced Custom Table Report: Improved the Custom Table Report by removing the multiple stacking options and making it a single select feature. Now when there are too many stacked entry options a scroll bar has been added to the tooltip.
5. Enhanced metadata support for Gitlab integration: To optimize ingestion functionality for the Gitlab integration using satellites, the following metadata fields have been added:
   check_project_membership: True by default. If set to true, SEI will only consider GitLab projects for which the token owner is a member. For self-hosted GitLab projects, where fetching ALL projects may be necessary, set this to false.
   Note: This should never be switched off for cloud GitLab instances.
   
   fetch_pr_patches: Controls whether to fetch patches or file diffs for PRs.
   fetch_commit_patches: Controls whether to fetch commit patches or file diffs.
   pr_commit_limit: Limits the number of commits fetched per PR to 250 by default.

Continuous Error Tracking

1. Event filtering Enhancement: Event filtering has been enhanced by removing event type selector boxes and displaying event counts above the events list. Additionally, a multi-select dropdown for event types has been introduced for improved usability.
2. Summary page Optimization: The Summary page loading time has been optimized. Now, the Summary page loads faster, ensuring a better user experience.
3. Additional support for Event Distribution Chart: The event distribution chart now supports plotting a graph for new events.

Full Continuous Error Tracking Release Notes

Platform

Here are some important improvements to our platform that should enhance your user experience:

1. Additional Support for secrets: You can now reference secret values in JSON files by using XPATH. Support is available for AWS Secret Manager, Azure Key Vault, GCP Secret Manager, and HashiCorp Vault.
2. Added support for HPA Configuration: The HPA configuration setting is now included in the default Kubernetes delegate YAML file.
3. Email Security Updates: To improve security, Harness has introduced a feature that allows you to add domain allowlists for Email, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Webhook, and PagerDuty notification channels at the account level. Earlier, this was only supported for fixed URL domains. Now, support has been added for expression URLs.
4. Enhanced Support for filters: The current List User Groups by filter API has a response limit of 10,000 documents. To improve the user experience, we have introduced a new API called Get filtered User Groups (getFilteredUserGroupsList) that provides pagination and filter support for fetched user groups with a response limit of 50,000 documents.
5. Audits for Secrets update: You can now view Runtime Usage for secrets.
6. Added Custom Certificates Support on Delegates: You can now add custom certificates to delegates by mounting files under /opt/harness-delegate/ca-bundle/ or mounting a folder to /opt/harness-delegate/ca-bundle/.
   
   Full Platform Release Notes

Self-Managed Enterprise Edition

1. Platform
   Pod Distribution Budgets added: Pod Disruption Budgets (PDBs) have been added to all applicable deployments/StatefulSets.
   
   Annotations and labels available globally: You can now set annotations and labels globally for all resources by adding the commonAnnotations and commonLabels settings under global in your override.yaml file.
   
   Kubernetes secrets for license values: You can now use Kubernetes-based external secrets for Harness license values in Helm charts.
   
2. Continuous Delivery & Gitops:
   General Artifact path support added: For generic (non-Docker) artifacts available in Artifactory, you can use an expression to specify the path to the artifact. This filter works in the same way as the artifact filter in Harness FirstGen, and it is useful when you want to fetch artifacts from multiple paths.
   
   Step-group variables in templates: There was no way in Pipeline Studio to add step group variables when creating a step group template. This section has now been added.
   
   
3. Continuous Integration:
   Support added for Manual Builds in TI: Test Intelligence now supports manual branch builds (the Git Branch build type). This is in addition to existing support for manual PR builds, as well as PR and push webhook triggers. When you enable Test Intelligence, you can use a manual branch build to Generate the initial call graph, and for subsequent pipeline runs
   
   
4. Service Reliability Management:
   UI Updates: The Service Health tab on the monitored service details page has been renamed to Change Impact
   
   Full Self-Managed Enterprise Release Notes

Early Access

Continuous Integration

1. Delegate Selectors for Codebase Tasks: With this feature flag enabled, Harness uses your delegate selectors for delegate-related codebase tasks. Delegate selection for these tasks takes precedence in order of pipeline selectors over connector selectors. CI_CODEBASE_SELECTOR

Chaos Engineering

1. Added Support for Resilience Probes: This feature is currently behind a feature flag named CHAOS_PROBES_ENABLED.

Software Engineering Insights (SEI):  

1. Github Actions Integrations Update: Added support for configuring the Github Actions integration using Satellite.

Self-Managed Enterprise Edition

1. Support for Post Prod Rollback for ASG: Added support for Post Prod Rollback for ASG deployment types. For these Services, a Rollback to the previous version can be triggered from the Services Dashboard. For more information, go to Rollback Deployments. This feature is currently behind the Feature Flag POST_PROD_ROLLBACK.
   
   Support for Post Prod Rollback for Native Helm: Added support for Post Prod Rollback for Native Helm deployment types. For these Services, a Rollback to the previous version can be triggered from the Services Dashboard. For more information, go to Rollback Deployments. This feature is behind the Feature Flag POST_PROD_ROLLBACK.
   
   Support for Github App Authentication: With this feature flag enabled, you can use a GitHub App as the primary authentication method for a GitHub connector. This feature is behind the feature flag CDS_GITHUB_APP_AUTHENTICATION and it requires Harness Delegate version 23.08.80308 or later
   
   

Full Early Access Release Notes

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