It’s here: support for templates in the Harness Software Delivery Platform.
We are excited to announce the introduction of templates into our Harness CI module. They will allow users to configure build steps and stages in their pipelines once and reuse them across the board for other services and projects.
‘Don’t Repeat Yourself’ is a principle in software development that ensures code is easy to maintain, and that reduces debugging nightmares for engineers. If you can do it easily for your code, why not do the same thing for your build pipelines?
This has been a challenge for most teams until now. With the help of templates in the Harness Software Delivery Platform, users can instill a consistent build process among different teams, provide frictionless onboarding for new services and teams, and increase developer productivity.
Consistent Build and Deployment Process
Organizations love to provide autonomy to their engineering teams when it comes to how they build and deploy services. However, this democratization can lead to chaos and heartaches for DevOps teams if they have to debug and fix issues for mission-critical services.
With the help of templates, teams will have a consistent way of building and deploying their services. It will also be easy to maintain and debug pipelines because templates that follow best practices can be shared across multiple teams. This does not take away the autonomy from the teams, as they can always choose to extend these templates and add their own steps.
Frictionless Onboarding for New Teams and Services
Onboarding to use a new tool or make a change to the current deployment process could be a daunting task for any team. It consumes a lot of time and energy. This process can now be simplified! DevOps teams can create starter templates that can be shared with the wider organization. New teams can start with a template that abstracts details, significantly reducing the learning curve for new teams.
Developer Productivity
Lastly, with templates, developers have less pipelines to maintain and debug. If a change needs to be made, it only has to be done in one place and all the other pipelines will automatically inherit this change. Templates help developers spend more time building features and helping customers rather than worrying about pipeline maintenance.
What’s Next?
This is just the beginning of templates in the Harness Software Delivery Platform. We plan on creating support for templates for entire pipelines and infrastructure components, notify users on new versions of pipelines (as Harness templates allow for versioning), and set Open Policy Agent-based governance rules for template consumption and standardization!
How Do I Get Started?
If you already use Harness CI and want to try out templates, it is available as part of our Early Access. Reach out to our customer success team to enable and play around with the feature. If you have yet to try our CI Enterprise product, you can sign up for a free trial today!