Harness Blog: DevOps, CI/CD Insights

SMU Reduces Rollback & Deployment Time by Over 80%

SMU becomes a deployment powerhouse by leveraging Harness.

Anatomy of Harness CD Pipelines , Part One

This blog will explain the process behind coming up with a simple CD YAML. But first, let's learn CD terminology.

Test Intelligence™: Move Fast, Don’t Break Things

Test Intelligence is a capability in our CI module that, at runtime, selects the tests that need to be run. Instead of running all the tests, which can take hours, the system selects a subset of tests and skips the rest.

Why You Should Use Undefined Instead of Null in Javascript

Avoids type coercion and improves clarity by preferring `undefined` over `null` in JavaScript logic.

Hack, Extend, Fly! Drone's First Hacktoberfest!

Hacktoberfest is a month-long celebration of open source that was founded in 2014 and encourages participation as well as brings awareness to the open-source community.

Harness Product Update | September 2021

See what we've been up to in September - and what's coming soon!

The Engineer Types, Part Deux: Which Are You?

There are quite a few engineer types out there. Last week, we went over four of them - and today, we're going over the last three. This was a super fun mini-series to write, and I hope you recognized yourself in one of these types!

Measuring Product Management Success: An Engineering Leader's View

Measuring success in product management can take time. Here are 5 criteria to look at.

Is Your Upstream My Downstream?

Microservices communication can get confusing with vague terms like "upstream" and "downstream." Remove ambiguity and use clearer terms with purpose to enhance understanding.

Learning the Science and Art of Effective REST API Design

Build rock-solid REST APIs! Learn the art and science of effective REST API design by exploring key principles to create intuitive and efficient APIs, enabling smooth system integration.

How to Prioritize the Developer Experience and Improve Output

Developer Experience (DX) is the overall interactions and feelings that the developer feels when working towards a goal.

Harness the Power of AWS EKS-Anywhere

Harness is excited to be part of the launch of EKS-Anywhere. As an intelligent software delivery platform, we can meet the expectation of successful application delivery - anywhere.

JUnit vs TestNG: Which Testing Framework Should You Choose?

A comparison of the features and use cases of JUnit and TestNG.

Our Journey Away From Jenkins and Into Harness CI

Harness, like many other companies, used Jenkins for the CI portion of our software delivery process. We had over 300 jobs generating an average load of approximately 4,000 builds per day.

Tutorial: [Monitoring and Observability] How to Send Kubernetes Delegate Logs to Splunk

Learn how to send Kubernetes delegate logs to Splunk using Harness. Follow this step-by-step tutorial for seamless log monitoring.

Benchmark: How Misusing Streams Can Make Your Code 5 Times Slower

Streams are an exciting feature in Java 8 but you need to be careful when using them.

Harness Product Update | August 2021

See what we've been up to in August 2021!

Metrikus Shortens Commit-to-Production Time by 66%

Metrikus made feature flag management easy with Harness. See how you can too.

Laying the Groundwork for an Effective FinOps Organization

Learn what FinOps is and how to effectively lay the groundwork for an effective FinOps organization. Being able to manage cloud spend is extremely important for Finance and Engineering teams.

Tutorial: [Artifact Servers] S3 - How to Provide Cross-Account Access Via Bucket Policies

Harness has a lot of customers with very different Artifact sources. One of the most famous is to use an S3 Bucket as the home for all kinds of artifacts.

Tutorial: [Observability] Publish Pipeline Events to Splunk HEC

In this brief tutorial, we’ll take advantage of Splunk HEC to integrate with Harness.

Change Management in the World of Continuous Delivery

Explore how Continuous Delivery transforms change management, streamlining processes and reducing bottlenecks for faster, more reliable deployments.

The Must Have Metrics Any DevOps and SRE Manager Should Measure

To understand what's happening inside each company, we need to measure the performance of DevOps and SRE teams.

Everything You Need to Know About Java 9

A look at the new features and capabilities of Java 9.

What Are Audit Trails & Why You Need Them in CD

An audit trail, also known as an audit log, is a chronological set of records that provides documentary evidence. The purpose of an audit trail can be used to trace a specific event, operation, or procedure.

Java Code Hacks – The Ultimate Deadlock Workaround

A creative workaround for a Jstack deadlock.

Discover Dollar Saves 70% On Their Cloud Bill

Discover Dollar made idle cost management easy with Harness. See how you can too.

Streamlining CI/CD and Optimizing AWS Cloud Spend

The cloud is a consumption-based model that can either be extremely efficient, or extremely costly. The below is how Linedata answered the above questions and reduced cloud spend.

Harness Product Update | July 2021

July was, as per usual, a busy month here at Harness! We’re super excited about an announcement that’s coming soon. Keep your eyes peeled near the start of August for great news about how we’ll help cut bill shock out of your life.

Single Digits Saves $108k in Deployment Effort

Single Digits made their migration easy with Harness. See how you can too.

5 Java Frameworks to Support Your Microservices Architecture

Rather than asking what specialized framework you need to build a new microservices architecture, let’s ask how we can use current frameworks to support the same goal.

Measuring & Maximizing Developer Productivity

Developer productivity is a key performance indicator used by DevOps teams across many industries. Learn how to measure and maximize developer productivity.

4 Best CI/CD Tools for DevOps

Discover the best CI/CD tools for DevOps, including Harness, GitLab, Codefresh, and Azure DevOps. Enhance your software delivery process.

Tutorial: Vault Agent Advanced Use Case With Kubernetes Delegates and Shared Volumes

Learn to use Vault Agent with Kubernetes Delegates and shared volumes in this detailed tutorial. Enhance security and deployment reliability.

Migrating to Harness Feature Flags: Our Technical Journey

Recently, we released a blog post on why we migrated from a homegrown feature flag solution to Harness Feature Flags. While that post covered many of the reasons we migrated, we want to share the technical journey, including the roadblocks we ran into and what the transition was like.

Migrating From Homegrown Feature Flags

We launched a new product - Harness Feature Flags - which is always tough, and exciting. On top of that, Harness - like many companies out there - already had feature flags we used day to day internally, through a home-built system that had evolved over the years.

Tutorial: How to Use the New Vault Agent Integration Method With Harness

Harness is about to release a new option to integrate with Vault to serve it as a Secrets Manager. Here's a tutorial!

Tutorial: Turning a GitHub Repo Into a Helm Chart Repo

Today, I want to share what I did with a customer to make his GitHub repo become an automated HTTP Helm Chart repo. This is a very good choice, since there’s a GitHub Action that we can use to keep the repo index updated automatically. Buckle up!

What Is Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)?

Learn about Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), its benefits, best practices, and implementation in CI/CD pipelines and DevOps environments.

Burst SMS Removes Outage Risk for Their Customers

Harness delivers better DevOps practices to all our customers. Find out how Burst SMS used Harness to reduce outages.

What are Feature Flags and How Do We Use Them?

Learn how feature flags improve development with controlled rollouts and experimentation. Explore their benefits and implementation.

Java Bootstrap: Dropwizard vs. Spring Boot

How to get a production-ready Java application off the ground in the shortest time possible.

Continuous Deployment in Angular

Simplify your Angular deployment process and gain greater control over feature releases. Discover how to set up continuous deployment and leverage feature flags to deliver a better user experience.

Harness Product Update | June 2021

It came, it went, it conquered! We’re talking about {unscripted}, of course - what an amazing 2 days packed with knowledge, great speakers, insightful panels, and industry-shaking announcements!

ShipTalk Podcast - A Time Before, During, and After Kubernetes

We go through in the episode describing the time right before containerization became popular to the journey that Santiago and firms have been on ever since.

Drone and AWS App Runner - Better Together

Getting started with Drone to handle the build and publish sections is a breeze, then allowing AWS App Runner to deploy into AWS infrastructure.

{unscripted} 2021 - Day Two Recap

Day two is a wrap at {unscripted} 2021. Lots of exciting Harness announcements helping everyone deliver software without toil.

Introducing Harness CI Enterprise

Harness announces CI Enterprise, a Continuous Integration tool built with test intelligence, native secrets, fine-grained RBAC, and more.

{unscripted} 2021 - Day One Recap

Day one is a wrap at {unscripted} 2021. If you missed day one, still time to sign up and catch day two!

Cloud AutoStopping™ - Active Management of Idle Cloud Costs

Harness Cloud Cost Management now provides Cloud AutoStopping, enabling active management of idle cloud resources to save up to 75%.

Share the Results and Outcomes of Your Experiments

Communicate experiment outcomes effectively! Split's new Share Results feature, enables you to download and share experiment metrics, fostering clear communication and informed decision-making.

Why Are Code Hotspots so Hard to Pinpoint?

Before you can figure out how to fix code hotspots, you need to be able to identify them and determine the risk factor around them.

Drone: From Zero to 100 Million Downloads

Through Harness, Brad was confident he’d be able to make Drone as ubiquitous as Jenkins. Learn how Drone went from zero to 100 million downloads.

Harness + Terragrunt

Watch the webinar now: Dheeraj Khanna, of Tenable, leads based on challenging the status quo. He strives to be a disruptive leader who faces any challenge head-on.

Harness Product Update | May 2021

Harness has been busy in the month of May creating new features, new content, hosting events, and building the future of CI/CD.

What is Cloud Cost Intelligence?

As cloud costs soar and more businesses seek to create good cloud cost management practices, the concept of cloud cost intelligence has become an increasingly important one.

Kubernetes CI/CD Best Practices

With all of the benefits that Kubernetes has, having good CI/CD practices is key. Kubernetes did not magically erase the discipline that your CI/CD journey has taken you on before Kubernetes. Leverage Kubernetes’s strengths to further your CI/CD journey.

How Zeotap Increased Deployment Velocity 36x

From Downtime Windows to Deployment Nirvana: Learn How Zeotap Increased Deployment Velocity 36x.

Pipeline Patterns for CI/CD Pipelines

Explore effective CI/CD pipeline patterns for fast, reliable deployments. Learn key strategies to optimize your software delivery.

5 Things You Didn’t Know About Synchronization in Java and Scala

Let’s explore the most synchronization idiom – the Object lock.

Automated DevSecOps with StackHawk and Harness

In this example, we will go through scanning an application before deploying the application to Kubernetes.

A Snapshot of DevOps

Learn key DevOps principles, culture, and practices to enhance software delivery with a focus on collaboration, tooling, and continuous improvement.

Best GoCD Alternatives & Competitors

There are many continuous delivery tools currently in the market. We broke down the top 15+ continuous delivery tools to consider to improve deployments.

What is O11Y? Observability Demystified with Chris Riley from Splunk

In this episode of ShipTalk, we are joined by Chris Riley who is a Senior Developer Advocate at Splunk talking about all things Observability [O11Y].

intelliflo Repurposed 2 FTEs + Increased Deployment Velocity 20x

Find out how intelliflo reduced their time spent on Jenkins maintenance.

Harness Product Update | April 2021

Harness has been busy in the month of April. Check out the latest product features, podcasts, webinars, events, press mentions, and more.

How to Reduce Code Cycle Time with Feature Flags

Improve engineering cycle time with feature flags that decouple deployment from release, enabling faster, safer delivery at every stage.

Introducing Recommendations API: Find Potential Cost Savings Programmatically

With the Recommendations API, there are now programmatic ways to gather the insights and recommendations that Harness CCM provides.

Understanding the Phases of the Software Development Life Cycle

Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) is a process of building software with the highest quality and lowest cost. Learn how Harness views the SDLC process.

Ancestry Cuts Downtime by 50% Using Harness Governance

Find out how Ancestry secured their platform using Harness.

ShipTalk Podcast - From House Fires to Production Fires

In this episode of ShipTalk, we are joined by James Bohrman who is the founder of Cloudspeakers.

CircleCI Alternatives to Consider

Discover the best CircleCI alternatives for CI/CD, including Jenkins, GitLab, and Harness, and their unique features and benefits.

A Breakdown of Continuous Integration Testing

Understand Continuous Integration Testing, its benefits, methodologies, and how it ensures software quality and reliability during the CI process.

AppDynamics vs. New Relic – The Complete Guide

New Relic vs. AppDynamics: All the performance features, integrations, installation procedures, and pricing plans side by side to help you decide which tool to use.

Accelerating DevOps With DORA Metrics

Explore DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) survey findings and share what you need to know about achieving Continuous Delivery and the DevOps philosophy on speed and stability.

Comparing Helm vs Kustomize

Two tools to tackle configuration and package management inside the Kubernetes ecosystem: Kustomize and Helm, respectively. Learn how they compare in this post!

Simultaneous Experimentation: Run Multiple A/B Tests Concurrently

Boost your experimentation velocity! Split empowers you to run multiple A/B tests simultaneously, accelerating data collection, optimizing features, and delivering impactful products quicker.

Raisin Runs from Jenkins Nightmare - Saves 525k per Year

Raisin removed their CD maintenance migraine, find out how you can too!

The Complete Guide to Error Tracking Tools

Rollbar vs. Raygun vs. Sentry vs. Airbrake vs. Bugsnag vs. OverOps

Best Argo CD Alternatives & Competitors

Discover top Argo CD alternatives like Flux, Jenkins X, and GitLab, each offering unique features for effective CI/CD in Kubernetes environments.

Harness Product Update | March 2021

Find out all the happenings from Harness product and marketing teams for the month of March 2021. ShipTalk Podcast anyone?

Jenkins PTSD: How One Developer Ditched the Butler For Good

If Jenkins was created to solve the pain point of automating the CI process, why does it require so much scripting?

Best Spinnaker Alternatives to Consider

Are you looking for a continuous delivery solution? We break down Spinnaker alternatives so that you can evaluate all of the best options.

Harness Commits New Dev Experience to Drone Community

Drone has several new capabilities to the Drone project so we can further simplify the developer self-service experience for Continuous Integration.

ShipTalk Podcast - DevOps in a Highly Regulated Industry

In this episode of ShipTalk, we are joined by Donovon Carter who is a DevOps Engineer at Dexcom, a medical device company. Dexcom is one of the firms leading the charge against diabetes with CGM, constant glucose monitoring technology.

Metrics to Improve Continuous Integration Performance

It is important to determine which continuous integration metrics are best to measure in order to track performance. Learn which performance metrics Harness measures.

Experimentation in Split: Make Your Events Work for You!

Learn how to extract, transform, and load user event data into Split to power experimentation and measure real feature impact at scale.

Continuous Delivery Tools to Consider

Explore the best continuous delivery tools, including open-source, platform solutions, and cloud provider options to streamline your DevOps workflow.

Swallowed Exceptions: The Silent Killer of Java Applications

In this post, our goal is to see what it takes to avoid the risks of mishandled errors.

Shiptalk Podcast - Shifting Complexities in DevOps with Jim Shilts

Jim has been working on solving engineering efficiency problems for over 20 years working at firms such as Build Forge and Electric Cloud, pre-dating the inception of Hudson/Jenkins. As Jim walks through his experience and how complexity and bottlenecks have shifted around in the decades gone by and what's in store for the future.

DevOps vs SRE: Enabling Efficiency and Resiliency

Understand the differences between SRE and Devops, and how to apply them to your teams.

The Women of DevOps: Patricia Anong

Meet Patricia Anong, DevOps Consultant. We're thrilled for you to meet her!

Best Octopus Deploy Alternatives & Competitors

Are you looking for an alternative to Octopus Deploy? We break down Octopus Deploy alternatives so that you can evaluate all of the best options.

The 5 Stages of Engineering Excellence : Chapter 2

Implementing the four DORA metrics should be the basis for all organizations to begin their journey to software engineering excellence.

Harness Product Update | February 2021

Find out all the happenings from Harness product and marketing teams for the month of February 2021. ShipTalk Podcast anyone?

Build an API with Node.js, Express, and TypeScript

Build a RESTful API with Node, Express, and TypeScript, and integrate Split feature flags to safely manage feature rollout and experimentation.

GitOps Got Me Up

Two years ago, I joined the technology space - and as such, I am now a strong proponent for DevOps methodologies.

The Logging Olympics: A Race Between Today’s Top 5 Java Logging Frameworks

Log4J vs SLF4J simple vs Logback vs Java Util Logging vs LOG4J2

ShipTalk Podcast - Washing Away Imposter Syndrome - Bart Farrell at Data on Kubernetes Community

Explore strategies to overcome imposter syndrome with Bart Farrell from Data on Kubernetes Community. Gain confidence and embrace change.

An Introduction to Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Explore the basics of AI and machine learning, including key concepts, types, and their impact on various industries.