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April 25, 2024

Streamline Multi-Environment Delivery with Painless Traffic Routing

Harness introduces out-of-the-box traffic routing with SMI or Istio, simplifying east-west traffic management for A/B testing, Canary, and Blue/Green Deployments, enhancing pipeline customization and control for DevOps teams.

At Harness, our mission is to simplify your delivery process. We're excited to introduce our latest feature: out-of-the-box traffic routing. This enhancement empowers you with east-west traffic routing capabilities. Choose your preferred routing service provider, whether it's SMI or Istio, and you'll be up and running in no time!

Let's dive deeper into traffic routing and explore how Harness makes it effortless.

Why is Traffic Routing Useful?

Splitting traffic between multiple environments is both an engineering and design problem. Deciding when to send traffic to different environments enables many use cases such as A/B testing, Canary Deployments, or Blue/Green Deployments. The ability to quickly adjust these traffic splitting decisions is crucial for devops teams that are trying to customize their pipelines for their specific architectures. Having an out-of-the-box solution allows our users to have this complete control at their fingertips. 

Navigating Traffic Routing in Harness

Harness offers flexible traffic routing through a service mesh. Currently, you can choose between [SMI](https://smi-spec.io/) and [Istio](https://istio.io/latest/) as your service mesh options.

You can set up traffic routing in three ways:

  1. Standalone Traffic Routing Step: Utilize the `K8s Traffic Routing` step for standalone routing configurations.
  2. Blue/Green Deployment: Define traffic routing options as part of your Blue/Green Deployment Step configuration settings.
  3. Canary Deployment: Define traffic routing options as a part of your Canary Deployment Step configuration settings.

Regardless of where you configure it, the routing options remain consistent. For a detailed guide on traffic routing with Harness, visit our Traffic Routing Step Reference.

Accessing the Feature

Excited to try out this feature? It's currently available behind a feature flag. Reach out to Harness Support to enable this functionality and elevate your delivery process today!

Sushrut Athavale

I am a software developer that has worked in the DevOps industry for 4 years. In my time in the industry I have become an active user of cloud technologies such as GCP, Kubernetes, Azure, Fluentd. I have worked with a companies that build on the cloud. I am highly skilled in object oriented languages such as C++, Python, and Golang. I've used golang to build CLIs and terraform providers. I am currently looking for a software developer position that will leverage my current skills and allow me to grow into something new. I also have interests in the following areas: In my time as a developer technology has moved forward at a lightning pace and I realized I wanted to be someone who is at the front talking about all the new exciting things happening (even the scary events like the SolarWinds attack!). For that reason I am aspiring to be a developer advocate and have even spoken at a few conferences! Please reach out if you are interested in connecting about developer advocacy. I have lot to learn, but its an exciting field to go in to. I'm also passionate about design. Design can be incredibly subjective but is still so important to a successful product. I've spoken about design a few times, but would love to learn/talk about it more, so please contact me about anything design related! In my free time I do a lot of acting and am a very passionate Dungeon Master (for DnD). I was the president of the RCPlayers, a theater troupe at the University of Michigan, and run an ongoing campaign of DnD for a few groups of my friends. I can't wait to bring these storytelling skills to more conference stages and tell the everchanging stories of the tech industry!

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