Unlocking Innovation: Harness Q2 Feature Releases That Accelerate Your DevOps Journey

Welcome to Harness’s Q2 Feature Launchpad! As software delivery demands grow increasingly complex, our mission remains steadfast: to empower engineering teams with smarter, safer, and faster tools that simplify and supercharge continuous delivery.

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This quarter, we’ve unveiled a powerful suite of enhancements across Kubernetes, Helm, AWS, Terraform, and more — each designed to streamline workflows, boost deployment confidence, and enable rapid recovery when issues arise.

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Dive in to discover how Harness is helping you take full control over your delivery pipelines, with new capabilities that reduce risk, remove friction, and put you in the driver’s seat for seamless, automated releases. Whether you’re deploying containers, serverless functions, or infrastructure as code, these Q2 updates unlock exciting possibilities to innovate faster and with greater peace of mind.

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Let’s explore the game-changing features you can start using today — backed by official documentation links to help you hit the ground running.

Kubernetes & Helm Deployments

Declarative Rollback: Enhanced Reliability
Rolling back a deployment should always restore your system to a known safe state. With Declarative Rollback, Harness now tracks hashes of config and secret manifests in your Kubernetes workloads. This means that during rollback, all configuration and secret changes are accurately reapplied or reverted—reducing drift and preventing misconfigurations.

Helm Test Flag Support on Deploy Commands
Testing is crucial before putting changes into production. Now, you can directly add the Helm test flag into your Harness deployment steps. This lets you automatically run chart-defined tests after deploying, catching issues immediately and fostering greater release confidence—no manual intervention required.

Granular Helm ‘Command Flags’ at Step Level
Sometimes, you need custom Helm command-line flags—like debug settings or custom timeouts—during deployment. You can now specify these flags at individual deployment steps within native Helm workflows, giving you total flexibility and fine-tuned control over every Helm operation.

Automated EKS Token Refresh for Seamless Deployments
AWS EKS tokens expire regularly, sometimes interrupting deployments. Harness now detects token expiry and transparently refreshes your credentials mid-deployment—reducing failed runs and keeping your CI/CD pipelines flowing without manual reauthentication.

Post Deployment Rollback Artifact Labeling
To simplify operational audits, artifacts involved in Helm post-production rollbacks are now distinctly marked as “N/A” for traceability. This helps teams quickly identify which artifacts were actually deployed after a rollback—supporting compliance and incident reviews.

AWS

Parallel ASG Rollbacks: Advanced Recovery
Large AWS operations often deploy to multiple Auto Scaling Groups (ASGs) in a single pipeline stage. Harness now supports parallel rollback across multiple ASGs—reversing several deployments simultaneously. This enables safer, coordinated, and faster disaster recovery in complex environments.

Canary Support for Lambda Deployments
Serverless deployments need gradual rollouts too. Harness brings native canary support for AWS Lambda, letting you direct a percentage of traffic to the new version(s) before full rollout. Discover issues early, minimize blast radius, and deliver serverless updates with new levels of safety.

Upload Artifacts to S3 from CD Pipelines
Artifact management got easier: you can now upload deployment artifacts directly to Amazon S3 as part of your CD pipeline. This supports archiving, analytics, and direct distribution from a centralized, secure location.

Terraform

Auto-Create Workspace for Remote Backends
When using Terraform with remote backends (like S3 or Terraform Cloud), Harness now automatically creates new workspaces if they don’t exist. No need for manual setup—simply define your infra as code and Harness handles backend initialization, reducing setup errors and saving engineering hours.

Connectors

Cross-Scope Access for GCP Connectors
Managing resources across multiple GCP projects? Harness GCP connectors now allow cross-scope (or cross-project) authentication, so teams can securely operate in different Google Cloud environments from a single pipeline, streamlining multi-project management.

Connector Type Variables for Dynamic Expressions
Use connector type directly in your pipeline expressions, supporting even more dynamic configuration—such as branching logic or conditional steps based on the type of connector in use.

Native OIDC Step for Secure Token Exchange
Cloud security and federation are easier than ever. Introducing a native OIDC step: automatically consume connectors and generate OpenID Connect tokens right in your pipeline, making it simpler to integrate with cloud providers and external identity systems securely.

Approvals

Exclude Pipeline Triggering User from Approvals
To enforce separation of duties, you can now prevent the user who started a pipeline from also approving it. This helps teams comply with regulatory requirements and ensures unbiased approval workflows.

Manual Refresh for Jira & ServiceNow Approval Steps
Harness users can now manually “refresh” the approval status from Jira or ServiceNow during pipeline execution—ensuring approval gates reflect the latest ticket state, even if updates happen after the pipeline starts.

Notifications

Enhanced Email Notification Subjects
Email notifications now include the service name and environment directly in the subject line, so that stakeholders and on-call engineers can instantly assess what’s impacted—accelerating incident response and triage.

GitOps Experience & Usability Enhancements

Redesigned GitOps Agent Details Page
The GitOps Agent Details page now features a cleaner UI, including paginated and sortable application lists, inline editing with a Save button, dynamic page titles that reflect the agent name, and clearly displayed agent versions. Mapped projects now link directly to their corresponding Harness projects for easier navigation.

Advanced Filtering for GitOps Agents
Managing GitOps agents is now easier with new filter options for Cluster ID, Project, Tag, and Agent Version. The UI also supports saved filters and dynamic dropdowns—improving usability for teams managing large environments.

Improved GitOps Application List View
The Application List now includes popovers with copy-to-clipboard buttons, server-side sorting for better performance, and preserved sort preferences when navigating back from detail views. Health and Sync statuses also include hoverable metadata for quick insights.

Interactive Health Status Bar in GitOps Overview
Clicking a health status (e.g., “Healthy”) on the Overview page now filters the dashboard to show only apps in that state—making troubleshooting and monitoring more efficient.

Label-Based Filtering in Sync Steps
You can now filter applications by label within GitOps Sync steps, allowing for more granular and controlled sync operations during deployments.

Accurate License Usage Metrics
To ensure fair and accurate billing, degraded and unhealthy pods are now excluded from GitOps license usage calculations—giving you a more realistic view of your usage footprint.

Pipeline Studio, Triggers & Execution Enhancements

Fail Fast Mode—Faster Feedback and Safer Deployments
“Fail fast” means Harness will immediately stop all further stages in your pipeline if a failure is detected, rather than waiting for all parallel executions to finish. This saves resources, speeds incident feedback, and avoids unnecessary downstream actions.

Reliable Webhook Trigger Execution via Queue Service
Harness now processes custom webhook triggers through the Queue Service for better scalability and isolation, ensuring reliable performance even under high load.

View Pipeline Metadata from Templates
You can now view metadata and advanced settings for pipeline templates directly in Pipeline Studio. The view is read-only and reflects only what's defined in the YAML.

Filter Executions by Build ID or Execution ID
Easily find past pipeline runs using filters for Build ID or Execution ID, including support for comma-separated values and saved filters.

Clickable Input Sets in Executions
Input Sets used in a pipeline run are now displayed as clickable links in the Inputs tab and the execution summary, helping you trace inputs quickly.

Enhanced Notification Templates with Error Messages
You can now include the <+notification.errorMessage> expression in notification templates to show failure details from the pipeline, stage, or step.

Switch Git Connector When Saving Templates
While saving a new template, you can now switch the Git connector—such as changing from project-level to account-level—without having to start over.

GitX Webhook Setup Without Connector Registration
Harness now allows GitX webhooks to be registered without requiring direct webhook creation in the Git provider, supporting intermediary service integration.

Granular Create/Edit Permissions for Pipelines and Templates
Harness now supports separate Create and Edit permissions for pipelines and templates, giving teams more control over access without over-provisioning.

Project-Level Pipeline Execution Concurrency
You can now prioritize execution concurrency by project. Assign High-Priority and Low-Priority projects to reserve slots for critical workloads.

Custom Git Status Checks for PR Pipelines
Customize the Git status checks sent during PR-triggered pipelines. Skipped stages now report “Success,” ensuring PR merges aren’t blocked unnecessarily.

View Template Version in Execution
You can now see the exact template version used in any pipeline execution, helping you track changes and ensure traceability.

Barrier Synchronization Across Parent and Child Pipelines
Barriers defined in a parent pipeline can now be reused by child pipelines via runtime inputs, allowing coordinated rollouts and consistent behavior across pipeline chains.

Harness is committed to delivering the tools engineering teams need to build, test, and ship with increased velocity and confidence. To dive deeper into any of these enhancements, click the links above or visit the Harness Developer Hub. Stay tuned—Q3 will bring even more innovation!

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